Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend in the studio.
GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet: What are you working on?
Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend: This may sound unusual, but, in the studio, I’m always trying to figure out what I’m doing. It’s just always been that way. It’s about discovery. I don’t want to know what I’m doing everyday, like I have a series and do subtle variations on the theme and it’s not so hard to think through the process of making. It’s not like that. It would be nice to feel more at ease in the studio, but that’s not the goal.
So I am working on the “Vignette” series and just finished a couple of modest pieces, painting on glass, that speak of discreet issues about the scale of human endeavor: woman to architecture and myth, a bust of a man with a background of simple hand-scribed numbers displayed in ascending order with a mirror. The viewer is part of the scene. I’m currently interested in juxtaposing photographic imagery, gestural mark making, digital manipulations, and abstraction in a mischievous manner.
The works continue to be a reaction to life, a filtering of vast amounts of visual information isolated on clear glass. Since 2001, after a Hauberg Fellowship focusing on painting on glass at Pilchuck with some of my favorite artists who work in glass (Dick Weiss, Walter Lieberman, Cappy Thompson, Paul Marioni, etc.), I decided to paint on glass in a more traditional manner, something I had avoided for decades. Using glass paints and firing in the kiln, a 12th-century phenomenon, at least, I decided to stay “true” to the material. (No more frigging mixed-media confusion.) However, I’ve always been a painter, dealing with the “space of glass,” no matter what permutation the work has taken. Joining diverse imagery and technical styles feels like the combining associated with mixed media. Ultimately, every image and material brings with it meaning associated with history, function, psychology and sociology, economics and aesthetics.
Susan: I’m constantly learning. I love to teach, but teach what I don’t know. Asking questions that I can learn with my students. I’m teaching more because I can, and am willing and want to encourage the use of imagery on glass. I taught at the Pittsburgh Glass Center for the first time this summer and enjoyed the time spent there. I went to a great show at the Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh is Warhol’s hometown) featuring work by Duchamp and Andy (conceptual bad boys) and it was way cool. Under the influence of Warhol, using imagery in glass seemed a natural in Pittsburgh. I’ll be teaching “Painting in the Space of Glass” at Pilchuck, first session 2011, and speaking about my work at the Glass Art Society conference in Seattle at the same time. Pilchuck is truly my alma mater having taught there so many times and learned so much from the people and place since 1980.
This summer’s Arshile Gorky retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles left me inspired for different reasons. His drawing ability is awesome and his invention of ambiguous form is so evocative of a real world and a subliminal one. The notion that he bridged the worlds of Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism is mindboggling. But I am in awe of his shapes and how he builds and destroys them with paint.
Susan Stinsmueller-Amend, Xfoliation, 1981. Etched & painted glass, jewels, decals, wood, metals, paint H 37, W 35 in.