Still, Life 2
Susan Rosenberg’s pictures are deceptive. Look at her flower or figure studies and you could well think that here is an English artist accustomed to working in the restrained Slade School manner wedded solely to traditional materials. Yet these works have been made by a painter with an exotic background, much-travelled and alert to the potential of new technology.
Not surprisingly, her ordered work stems from a structured routine. Despite family commitments, she travels regularly during the week to a studio away from where she lives. “When I close the studio door I put daily life and the world behind me. I love the solitude.” Using water-based paint, she chooses to work flat on the floor. As she finishes each day’s work she cleans her brushes to start the next afresh. When she returns, Susan takes the opportunity to make a cup of tea, prop up the dried picture and decide how she will proceed. She likes to work on several at a time.
The body scanner that she employed for her 2001 Millinery Works exhibition Mirages has been used to create still lifes for her current exhibition Still, Life (the comma is intended), depicting such objects as vases and flowers. Susan is enthusiastic about this new technique’s potential, while being amused that it was originally developed for the US military and the Japanese lingerie industry.
The chance hearing of a radio programme first informed her about the scanner. This provides a three-dimensional image of the body’s surface with an infra-red position-sensitive detector, similar to that in a camera. Infra-red beams are bounced off the body’s surface, a sensor detecting the returning light rays, determining the distance between body and detector. The result is a map of a body’s external surface.
By the time Susan learned about it, scanning was being investigated for such medical purposes as monitoring post-operative recovery, measuring muscle wastage in patients infected with HIV-1, planning maxillo-facial surgery and assessing wound and burns. “I thought the body scanner would give me a new vision, and it did.” She made contact with the device’s developers, who liked her ideas and began to co-operate with her.
Susan’s chosen route for Mirages, an evolving and organic one, was to scan the exterior body of a model and then manipulate the image with graphics software. Having achieved the right positioning, the selected image could be employed to create what was desired on paper or canvas. For her new work, Susan was the first to scan still life objects, obtaining unusual results that she hoped would expand the concept of this particular genre. Scanning had turned her own artistic vision in a new direction, rather in the way that the computer has hugely expanded artists’ opportunities.
The use of the scanner might be compared to the introduction and development of Cubism almost a century ago by Picasso and Braque. They aimed, on a two-dimensional surface, to depict objects as they are known from all aspects, rather than as they appear in a particular moment and from one aspect only. The Cubists’ multi-planed images were, of course, created with materials that artists had used for centuries, a linking of the new and the old.
Like them, Susan has a great affection for the old materials, for their tactile qualities. “I love making things with my hands, the feel of the paper I use. I believe it is important to extend our vision with new technology, but I still enjoy working with more traditional techniques.” In some works stemming from the scanning technique, she says, “colour is multi-layered, creating surfaces of great depth and richness. In others, the paper or canvas is drilled thousands of times with a jeweller’s drill, creating a deeply textured image that catches and holds layers of cloud-like pigment.”
Despite utilising an exact technique such a the scanner, Susan insists that what she sets out to depict “is not a likeness. I could not be a portrait painter, although many people have asked me to paint portraits. A picture for me is the sum total of a lot of experiences, and what you leave out is as important as what you put in. I am a formalist, and the painting must work formally, with line, colour and composition.”
Susan admires “the emotional power in the formalism of Chardin’s work.” She viewed the Royal Academy Chardin exhibition three times, admitting that “it was a turning point for me.” Other admired artists mentioned range over the centuries: Rembrandt, Rothko, Bonnard and Redon. A huge Matisse still life in the recent Tate Modern Picasso and Matisse exhibition made a big impact.
Susan Rosenberg’s new show is a mix of large and small pictures. Although she likes working on a big sheet of paper, she has often been impressed by the power of small pictures when visiting shows in London public and commercial galleries and insists that one must not underestimate their impact. As she puts it, “a sonata can be as powerful as a symphony, and is no less important.”
David Buckman.
Author,
The Dictionary of Artists in Britain since 1945.
Copyright 2004