Edward Williams Gallery Fairleigh Dickinson University Exhibit

By Robert Ayers

“I’ve led a very simple life,” Susan Sommer says with a smile, seeming a little perplexed by the suggestion that her art might have been influenced by her biography.

Still, although her work is utterly abstract and we would be mistaken in looking for even the most rudimentary traces of representational detail in her canvases, each painting she makes bears the stamp of a series of learning experiences that together form the basis of her artistic personality.

Sommer took both art lessons and formal ballet classes as a child. At fifteen she began five years as an enthusiastic student at the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan, spending as much as eight hours a day drawing and painting from the life model. Between 1968 and 1972 she followed the BFA course at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. Whereas both the League and Moore encouraged representational art, Sommer had already discovered her passion for abstraction.

As soon as she graduated from Moore, Sommer set herself up in a studio in New York City and began painting and studying with jazz musician and philosopher Bob Bianco whose teaching derived from Joseph Schillinger’s remarkable volume The Mathematical Basis of the Arts. This philosophy still underpins her assumptions, and although she recognizes that artistic decisions have to be made intuitively, she insists that only a mathematically correct painting can be successful.

After almost a decade in the city Susan Sommer embarked upon what has been the most enduring and significant influence on her work, living close to nature. She has had a home in the foothills of New York’s Catskill Mountains for thirty five years and happily admits that her work is shot through with her daily experience of the sights and sounds of the natural world. “I take in the landscape all the time,” she says, “and what goes into my unconscious comes out on the canvas as an improvisational expression.”

Each of Susan Sommer’s paintings starts with a technique that she learned years ago in the life room of the Art Students League. She draws one line, or one long gesture. In figure painting this would derive from the life model’s spine. In paintings like City Squares she immediately complicates that gesture with the addition of a grid of squares drawn in with pencil and ruler.

These paintings belong to a direction that Sommer calls Squarism, and they have their genesis in watching television in her daughter’s Los Angeles apartment in 2013. The pixel-like squares that the imperfect TV picture would repeatedly break into struck Sommer as a fascinating possibility for pictorial invention.

Sommer insists that the color of the first square that she paints is her only subjective decision in the entire painting. Her second mark might be red – for the simple reason that she wants there to be a red highlight in the finished painting – but thereafter every decision is a response to what has gone before. She might add hues that are variations on that first red, or greens that oppose it. This might be followed by neutral greys, or contrasts of blacks and white.

All of these decisions are arrived at intuitively, and to the accompaniment of a constant musical soundtrack. Sommer’s studio is alive with the sounds of jazz. She has compiled hundreds of tracks and plays them on shuffle so that she never knows what will come next. But they all feature improvisational musicians like Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson and George Gershwin with whom she feels her painting shares an affinity.

City Squares is the latest picture here and Sommer found it difficult to integrate the brightly colored squares with the colors and rhythms drawn from nature. “It was a real fight,” she says with a smile. “I went back and reworked it many times. It wasn’t an easy birth.” In fact Susan Sommer is never easily satisfied by her own work, because her aim is nothing less than beauty, simplicity, and clarity. “I feel that I can express myself more accurately in paint than in words,” she explains, “but whatever one says on the canvas has to be beautifully said.”

Susan Sommer’s Monarch Butterflies gouaches on paper are small in scale and painted as swift improvisations. We should not mistake them for minor works however.

They distill a wide range of knowledge and stimuli, and while Sommer explains that they are “based on living in the country,” and adds that “they are about the sound of nature, and about the color of nature,” she stresses that these sources are always balanced by “a desire to be purely abstract”.

Deeply absorbed lessons about structure underpin their creation. Sommer emphasizes her father’s influence, describing him as “a builder who understood the importance of a strong foundation” and recalling that he insisted that she spend two years of her adolescence working for an architect to gain “discipline of the hand” through the technical mastery of mechanical drawing and architectural lettering.

Equally important are structural lessons learned from the history of modernist painting, from plein air predecessors like Cézanne, through Picasso’s cubist grids, to the monumental works that de Kooning and Kline built upon them. In fact she credits the vigorously applied brushmarks that constitute the Monarch Butterflies paintings to “the abstract expressionist in me”.

The butterflies themselves are hinted at rather than represented by swiftly applied strokes of reds, yellows and orange, and it is no accident that they have played such a central role in Sommer’s art. Summer visitors to the Hudson Valley share the landscape during the months when Sommer can work outdoors. Though they are far less delicate we might assume – they live for weeks and each autumn they migrate to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond – their numbers have been decimated in recent years as their habitats are threatened by modern agricultural methods.

Still, despite their vulnerability they return perennially to add their indomitable beauty to our world. It is as though they stand for Sommer’s creative spirit, for she stresses that in painting it is vital to “stay in the moment,” adding “it’s a more honest expression that way. All you are is what’s happening right now. You’re not what used to be.”