Suzanne Hill
Saint John's veteran thinking painter realizes her work is more dependent on New Brunswick's landscape - the seacoast, figureheads, high water marks - than she realized
q Age?
a 64
q Provenance?
a I spent most of my growing up in the Montreal area. I went to Mount Allison for my bachelor of fine arts. My mother checked out the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and decided that her 16-year-old daughter was going to go to the Maritimes where they knew how to behave. After graduation, I worked at a number of challenging art-related jobs - selling gloves, drafting telephone systems, management trainee - and finally realized that art teaching would likely be better as a career. I went to Macdonald College, and began teaching in the Lakeshore area west of Montreal. When Jack and I married, he worked for a manufacturing company. When he decided to do his bachelor of education, we returned to Mount Allison. Both of us were hired as teachers in Saint John, where we raised our two daughters, and here we are. I taught for 33 years full- and part-time until 10 years ago. Without real planning or strategizing, I worked at a parallel career as an artist while I was teaching, and now I am involved with that full-time.
q Why art?
a Why not? I was the first of my family to attend university - and in spite of guidance counsellors, my parents decided they would support whatever I chose to do, as long as it ended up with a degree. The move into art teaching as a career was based on the assumption I would not be a practising artist but would be a practical wage earner and still connect to the discipline. Obviously, this was not the way things worked out. In my last few years of teaching, I found that most of my high school students were open to visual art, wanted to do it, and produced really creative solutions to the problems they encountered. Giving them a snapshot of the art biz from the artist's side as well as the educator's kept me learning and researching areas I would perhaps have left alone had I been exclusively pursuing my own path as an artist, or working exclusively as a teacher.
q What was your breakthrough moment?
a I suppose if there was a breakthrough, it was when I realized that if I could balance family, teaching and making art I could "have it all-" it would just take a little longer.
q What would you be if you weren't an artist?
a I really don't know"‚."‚."‚. probably there would have to be some kind of a product - a building or a garden or food, a book - concrete proof that I had actually done something.
q Your current obsession?
a Finishing the project I began in 2001 - The High Water Mark - and getting it ready to tour in the fall. That involves tidying up all the loose ends, erasing the smudges, re-stretching warped canvases, making sure everything will be hung right-side up, and avoiding the impulse to start all over and do it differently!
q What are you working on next?
a Becoming Invisible, a series that will be based loosely on Susan Sontag's 1978 essay; looking at invisibility and asking questions whether this is a
good thing or not.
q What place on Earth inspires you?
a I firmly believe that "wherever you go, there you are"‚."‚."‚." so location is really about your own attitude at any given time. Possibly if you feel pretty good you can connect that to a place? I must say, though, that visits to one of my daughters in Iqaluit generated quite a few paintings based on that environment. It's dramatic country, with nothing between the sea, sky and land to soften the impact of what seems to be limitless space. The Northern series are the only real "landscapes" I've explored in art.
q What place in New Brunswick inspires you?
a At first I didn't think there was any particular New Brunswick connection to what I do but then I realized that I've made several series that are dependent on the seacoast, the edges of the land, images and objects tied to these places. One of my first large shows was based on figureheads and then there was an installation around the ideas connected to weirs, and of course the current group of works based on the tide line or high water mark.
q Secret indulgence?
a I do insist on a real smoked meat sandwich whenever we pass through Montreal. This is hardly a secret, however.
q Your favourite hero of fiction?
a I discovered Catch-22 early on and have always felt that Yossarian or possibly Major Major Major Major had lessons for me about the essential weirdness of life, and the lack of control we exercise over it all. Carol Shields' heroine Reta, in Unless, makes a great deal of sense to me. Of course, almost any serial detective person can rivet my attention for the time it takes to get from the beginning to the end"‚."‚."‚.
q What is your greatest extravagance?
a Shoes unsuitable for a person of my age and/or lifestyle.
q What is your greatest fear?
a Snakes for probably the same reason people are afraid of spiders or rodents. Do you suppose there is some kind of prehistoric residual warning mechanism?
q Greatest joy?
a A day when it all gets done! and the sun shines.
q Your favourite painting on Earth?
a I have NO IDEA which is my favourite. I could narrow it down to perhaps five or six: one of Turner's atmospheric paintings - The Fighting Temeraire; one of Francis Bacon's triptychs or the yelling Pope - the human form transformed; also Betty Goodwin's intense and singular approach to the human condition - any one of a number of series; a Bonnard interior"‚."‚."‚. amazing use of colour; Richard Deibenkorn's Park series - the maplike quality, the unerring exclusion of anything unnecessary.
q Favourite painting by a New Brunswick artist?
a I don't think I could narrow it down to one painting. Or even one artist. There are so many really creative and original artists who have worked or are working in the province that it is impossible to choose one. Am I evading this question because it is too hard to answer? Yes.
q What are you reading?
a Nothing at the moment as my grandchildren are visiting.
q What's on your iPod?
a Ahem. No iPod.
q What talent would you like to have?
a I would like to understand machinery and not break things that turn on and off.
q What is the greatest public misconception about art?
a I would venture to say it could be that the longer it takes to make an artwork the "better" it is.
q Your most treasured possession?
a Jack and the girls.
q What is your motto?
a When in doubt, leave it out.
q How would you like to die?
a Quickly, with a minimum of fuss, and not quite yet.
q What is your favourite art museum?
a Another "favourite" question! I think my favourite will be the Prado in Spain, should I be lucky enough to get there.
This connects to the next question:
q What piece of artwork have you not seen in person that you'd like to see before you die?
a I would like to see the works of Velasquez, El Greco and particularly Goya. I have a feeling that book images don't do them any justice at all.
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