A sublime vision: the art of Susan Hodgin
Looking over the lineup for art exhibitions at the Harrison Center this First Friday, Oct. 1 in the Harrison Center, I came upon the listing for the “Complete Life group show in the Underground Gallery”, According to the listing, “the artwork is created by caregivers, patients, and staff of the IU Health Simon Cancer Center. Each individual art piece tells a story of the personal journey of the artist, and this show demonstrates the power of the arts for human connection.” In 2014, I visited the Cancer Center because Harrison Center artist Susan Hodgin was a patient there. Susan, who died in August, 2014, is remembered fondly by her fellow Harrison Center artist and her work still hangs in its halls. I figured there wouldn’t come a better time to publish this piece on Susan that I’ve been working on for a while.
In September, 2010 I went to the Indianapolis Art Center to review the Annual Faculty and Staff Exhibition for the (then) alternative weekly NUVO and came across Susan Hodgin’s “Gale”. It was a seven-panel mixed media painting depicting a raging storm, or her impressions of a raging storm, but the painting couldn’t be described as impressionistic. This painting was different from any painting of a storm I had ever seen. There was beauty in the swirling bold colors but also a vigorous — even violent — rhythm to the work, like the refrain in a hard jazz melody, flowing through the panels. What also impressed me was a strong sense of depth which she created by building up volume with a series of mostly non-perpendicular, but often intersecting, lines. It was as if she was looking beyond the veil of normal reality and perceiving the underlying structure of the storm, rather than its mere appearance. “Gale” differed from any of the work that I had seen from Susan before. It struck me as the work of a painter with a profound and focused vision.
“Gale”by Susan Hodgin (detail). Oil, acrylic, charcoal, oil pastel on canvas. (2009)
But it wasn’t only her art that I was thinking about during my first interview with her, in late 2011, at her studio at the Harrison Center for the Arts, on the near northside of Indianapolis. I was also thinking about her recent life history. She had been diagnosed with third-stage colon cancer in 2011 while pregnant with her first child Anna, who was born in early 2012. She was pregnant at the time of our interview. But we talked about her work and her new studio first, rather than these new challenges. She had just moved out of a smaller Harrison Center studio and she was thrilled with this larger, well-lit space she had made her own.
It was in her old studio, in 2009, when I had first seen Susan’s paintings. On her canvases of that time, you could often see piles of circles and ellipses that would form the foreground of colorful, abstracted landscapes. Often these accumulations looked like mountains. I had appreciated this work for its beauty and color, there was a certain lack of depth — in terms of perspective, not in subject matter. I wasn’t captivated by it (although I have since come around to appreciate this earlier work). What I didn’t know at the time was that she was ready to move on from this style. That is, she felt that she had reached an impasse in her art. As she wrote in her MFA thesis essay, “These pile forms dominated my paintings, both thematically as well as visually. Solid and weighty, they were bound to the canvas by the law of gravity … By the time I entered graduate school, I was caught in this flat, hotly colored world.” It was a prelude to a leap in her artistic practice that took place during her work towards her Master of Fine Arts in a low-residency program at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. She began the program in 2009 and received her MFA in 2011.
“I was in this program because I was ready to really push myself visually,” she told me in the studio. “I’ve been slowly growing, evolving as an artist for years but I really wanted to accelerate. I really wanted the resources of a university program to help push me further than I was doing on my own. I started really incorporating a lot more lines, a lot more linear aspects into my work. I was going with my desire to paint extremely large. If I could always paint that big my life would be a very good one. I love painting extremely large so I just kind of indulge myself there.”
The large size of the “Gale” septych and her other recent paintings impressed me with their ambition and scale. But the break between her older and newer work doesn’t just relate to her desire to paint large. This desire was more than just about aesthetics. It was a result of her encounter with British philosopher Edmund Burke. Susan found his 1757 essay “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” profoundly impactful to her life as an artist. Per Burke the sublime — which has the power to inspire and destroy — comes across as a more compelling subject matter for artists than the merely beautiful. In his treatise, Burke also makes the case that the obscure has a more powerful hold on the human imagination than realism and that is where the sublime draws its power: “Even in painting, a judicious obscurity in some things contributes to the effect of the picture; because the images in painting are exactly similar to those in nature; and in nature, dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions, than those have which are more clear and determinate” (136)
Susan’s work derives its power from some of these effects that Burke described. “Gale”, in all its turbulence, makes me think of the way Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” departs from realism — where the turbulence of emotion and nature become one. She also makes me think of the 20th century figurative painter whose work couldn’t be more different in terms of subject matter: Francis Bacon. I see in Bacon what Burke describes in the passage above as “a judicious obscurity” that leaves much to the imagination while drawing me deeper into his portraiture of psychologically-tortured subjects. There is also a profound awareness of how the medium creates meaning. The art critic Robert Hughes said of Bacon’s work in The Shock of the New; “The paint has a dreadful materiality, as though the grainy, cellular structure of the pigment, swiped with a loaded brush across the canvas, were a smear of tissue” (298).
The materiality of the medium was important to Susan. She painted in a variety of mediums —- oil, acrylic, oil pastel, and charcoal among them. She would sometimes let the paint drip down — or turn the painting upside down and have the paint drip towards the top of the canvas. That the drips of painting rose above the surface of her paintings and congealed there — and that these paintings at the same time conveyed a profound sense of depth — struck me. It was as if she was saying, with this gestural painting, that the depth of our understanding is akin to the dried drips rising above the impenetrable painting surface.
“Sunrise Climb on Mount Baldy” Susan Hodgin, 2011
Susan told me that her new paintings were maps of landscapes rather than landscapes. Yet they also work as landscapes. They are clearly set outdoors and there is often a clear horizon line. Her 2011 painting “Sunrise Climb on Mt. Baldy” relates to a climb she took in New Mexico when she was sixteen years old. If the depiction of this mountain looks somewhat bleak, it’s because Susan isn’t holding your hand as you slip through the transparent planes of the painting’s surfaces. You might think of an MRI scan of a mountain, if such a thing were possible, there is an aspect about it that is “dark, confused, uncertain” per Burke. But you also get the sense by peering into the mountain you are also peering into the void — into the vast empty spaces between atoms. The blood-red at the base of the peak falls into the Burkean realm of the sublime because one false step on a mountain climb can send you to your death.
Burke, in his treatise, also ruminates on the beautiful. There is a beauty about her paintings that conforms to his notion that variation creates interest. By creating volume, or the illusion of three-dimensional space, with her lines, Hodgin creates a depiction that is varied in a way that will not “weary or dissipate the attention” per Burke. But more important, in considering Susan’s modus operandi as a painter, are her own ideas about value: “In all honesty color is once again very secondary to subject matter, and color to me functions more as value than color,” she told me. “Value is what creates volume if you’re working on a piece. Thank goodness most of us are able to experience color but we could function just fine in a black and white world. That said, we could not function in a world without value, without light and shadow.”
It is also her treatment of volume and value that gives her work the transparent quality that allows the viewer to see beyond the luminescent planes that she creates in her compositions. This is a beautiful effect that she often manages to balance within the darker and more uncertain aspects of her compositions. And these darker elements conform to the Burkean notion of the sublime: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime (148).
While Susan was not explicitly painting her illness into her art, not at this point in her career, I had come into the interview expecting to acknowledge in my article Susan’s ordeal with cancer. But during my studio visit, talking to her, I resolved to respect her desire for privacy; she wanted her exhibit to be about her art. So I published her artist profile, “Susan Hodgin: dreamed … not perceived” on January 10, 2012 without a mention of her illness. In retrospect I wonder, if Susan feared, in part, that I would’ve slipped into using metaphoric language — such as describing her illness as a battle with cancer — or the like. In Susan Sontag’s treatise Illness as Metaphor, the cultural critic describes the many ways that commonly-used metaphors are not helpful for cancer patients because, even if the language doesn’t make them feel like they’re to blame for their disease, it’s nevertheless metaphorically-loaded, with even the disease’s name equating “the epitome of evil.”
But it would soon become impossible for me to avoid discussion of Susan’s illness, if I were to write about her. This time came in April, 2014, when she sent me an email inviting me to visit her in the Simon Cancer Center in Indianapolis, and I accepted the invitation. This hospital stay came after a brief post-pregnancy remission, and her cancer had taken a turn for the worse. I saw, as soon as I entered her hospital room, that she was still creating art — with crayon on paper, as there were sheets of paper scattered all over her room. She was preparing for an exhibition titled A Limitless Existence which was part of a larger show titled The Mother Artist Project at the Harrison Center that featured photographs of artists who were mothers, including Susan (who had a successful pregnancy despite her cancer).
Susan was able to smile as we talked but she seemed tired. She had a laptop open on her tray beside an open pack of corn flakes.
“I’m doing end-of-life planning,” she said. Just as her canvases had become smaller so had her subject matter: her end-of-life planning presumed a very short horizon-line and in her new work there were no horizon lines at all. It was clear, as she began to talk, that she had thought for some time about what it was she wanted to convey to me:
"Now I'm actually facing the most fear that I've ever faced before in my life,” she said. “I'm not talking about theoretical fear. I'm not talking about needing to go to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro to find my fear. It's right here and it's in boring old Indianapolis at a cancer center surrounded by a million other people doing the exact same thing that I'm doing. It's very mundane. People get cancer and die of cancer all the time. No one's going to write a novel about me facing cancer because everyone does. But it doesn't make it any less terrifying to be told that you have a finite amount of time. And so my work is still about trying to find the beauty within that fear but my fear, instead of becoming this sweeping natural disaster — this gorgeous landscape of beauty and rain and fire and sun and light and absence — it has taken on a much more microscopic, much more human, much more corporeal form.”
Accordingly Susan’s painting, immediately prior to her hospitalization, was at a smaller scale and more gestural than her previous work. Her painting “Faceless” is much more “microscopic” and more “corporeal” than her landscapes, as if she was portraying the cancer cells subdividing on a microscopic level while constricting her existence, obliterating her individuality and her identity as an artist. And like her hospital drawings, “Faceless” and the other paintings in the exhibition acknowledged both the small scale in which cancer cells live and that she did not have long to live.
“Faceless #3” oil on canvas
With a team of doctors to help support her, and arriving in a wheelchair, Susan was able to attend the reception for her exhibit A Limitless Existence, where “Faceless” was exhibited on May 2, 2014. She was even able to walk, and sit on a stool, for a short time. In addition to the works painted on canvas, there were also some of the works on paper that Susan had completed while in the hospital. After her reception, her health declined rapidly. The next time I saw her she was in hospice care. We were able to speak briefly but she was heavily-sedated and on strong pain medication.
Susan died on Aug. 22, 2014, at the age of 36, and was survived by her husband Stephen Nelson and their daughter Anna. Walking through the Harrison Center, even now, you can occasionally see the work of artists who were clearly influenced by her artistic language, using lines in such a way to build the illusion of three-dimensional space from abstract planes of color. You can also still see a small selection of her paintings at the Harrison Center, which exhibited her work in several exhibitions posthumously.
Susan was a visionary artist. At a time when high technology, combined with a slavish fetishization of the old masters, dominates the art world, I wonder how many artists of Susan’s caliber are being forced to the margins. Consider the dozens of digital art exhibits across the U.S. where you could inhabit, for a brief moment, digital facsimiles of van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” and other paintings. One of these digital light shows, the LUME by Grande Experiences, now takes up the entire fourth floor of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields where the contemporary art exhibitions used to be housed.
In the language I used in my published eulogy, I tried to center Susan’s work as an artist and not the pathos of her cancer. She would have wanted me to do no less, as she knew I was the only one writing about her art. Although she wanted sales from her artwork to benefit her daughter and she hoped my stories would help her accomplish this, she didn’t want to create unnecessary drama. But who could tell me that the life of this artist, who created some of the most astonishing paintings I have ever seen, isn’t worthy of such attention?
Works Cited:
Burke Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Project Gutenberg, London, 2005 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15043/15043-h/15043-h.htm. Accessed April 28, 2021
Grossman, Dan.“Artist Profile: Susan Hodgin” nuvo.newsnirvana.com. January 4, 2012. https://nuvo.newsnirvana.com/arts/visual/artist-profile-susan-hodgin/article_f0967fae-f3c8-5910-9ac6-5e774c60ccba.html. Accessed 24 March 2021.
Grossman, Dan. “A Sisterhood of Mother Artists,” nuvo.newsnirvana.com. April 30, 2014. https://nuvo.newsnirvana.com/arts/visual/a-sisterhood-of-mother-artists/article_234019a1-2b18-532a-b05e-702f4b9ac3f2.html. Accessed 24 March 2021.
Hodgin, Susan. Faceless #3. 2014. ”May 2014: A Limitless Existence.” https://www.harrisoncenter.org/first-fridays/may-2014-a-limitless-existence. Accessed 28 April 2021
Hodgin Susan. Gale. 2010. “Review: Susan Hodgin at the Harrison”. nuvo.nirvana.com. https://nuvo.newsnirvana.com/arts/visual/review-susan-hodgin-at-the-harrison/article_22104c58-2368-5509-95bc-56d4b592e2e7.html. Accessed 28 April 2021.
Hodgin, Susan. Sunrise Climb on Mount Baldy. 2011. “Fwd: Susan's large painting documentation.docx” Message to Dan Grossman from Joanna Beatty Taft. 24 April 2021.
Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. New York, Knopf, 1991.
Sontag, Susan, and Susan Sontag. Illness As Metaphor ; And, Aids and Its Metaphors. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others, Monoskop.org. 2013 https://monoskop.org/images/a/a6/Sontag_Susan_2003_Regarding_the_Pain_of_Others.pd.
