Sunset in the Canyon

There are times when Suzanne Donazetti literally bleeds for her art. She has the extraordinary ability to weave and paint strips of copper into soft grassy fields or glowing sunsets, but that doesn’t take away from the hard reality of working with the material.

“It’s just the little tiny edges on the copper,” says Suzanne. “When I first started, I would tear my fingers up.”

By the time her painted weavings are hung on the wall, all danger is smoothed away. Rolling peaks and valleys beautifully distort complex copper grids, and colorful abstract paintings dance at the will of the warps and wefts. In her upcoming show “Woven Dreams,” Suzanne plays an alchemist, turning solid metal into liquid windows that frame other worlds.

Suzanne, who lives in Maryland, started weaving sheet silver 23 years ago. She’d been creating jewelry but her concepts kept pushing her somewhere else.

“I just wanted to weave and warp it, and do things that are hard to do with jewelry,” she said. “That’s when the adventure began.” Over the next few years she switched from silver to copper and from dull patinas to a rich array of liquid acrylics, airbrush inks and powdered pigments. “It just kind of evolved,” she says.

“Woven Dreams” shows an exploratory process perfected. The originality of Suzanne’s techniques makes the effortless, natural quality of the finished products almost shocking to the uninitiated eye. It’s a bit like diving into Wonderland, the eye a curious Alice traversing billowing checkerboards.

Fire and Ice

To create the works, Suzanne applies metallic leaf on two sets of 36 gauge copper—a warp and a weft—and sands them. Then she paints abstract designs or “two-dimensional landscapes” on them, carefully planning her brushstrokes so that they’ll fit together in the final weaving. After waxing over the pigments she cuts the warps and wefts and fits them together, ready to be surprised by how everything meshes.

“It never turns out the way I plan it, but it’s always interesting in the end,” she says.

Suzanne lived in New Mexico for a while in the 1980’s, so her journey to Santa Fe for the August 3rd artist’s reception is something of a homecoming. This time she’ll be accompanied by her daughter, son-in-law and two important collaborators: her grandsons.

The artist has taken to hiding motivational messages and prayers under the leaf of most of her paintings. When one of her grandsons took an Arabic class, Suzanne began weaving his old homework into her compositions. Her other grandson is a violinist, and his music homework soon caught her eye as well.

“I’m letting the words show,” she says. It’s a new direction, an experiment with the abstract symbols that turn into speech or beautiful music. Suzanne’s violinist grandson will be playing at the event—an aural landscape to accompany her visual ones.

Suzanne says viewers also see her shows as tactile adventures. It’s hard to keep gallery goers from sliding their fingers across the works. Perhaps they hold the memory of those hardworking fingertips.

“It’s very touchable, but you have to be gentle,” she says. “Sometimes you make little nicks in the copper.”

Come see Suzanne Donazetti’s “Woven Dreams” from July 31st to August 13th, or come to the reception on August 3rd and ask the artist if you can reach out and feel. Just don’t hurt the work—or vice versa!

Canyons and Mesas

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Canyon Longhorns - Andree Hudson

When we called Andrée Hudson at her Denver studio last week to talk about “Motion and Emotion,” she was in the middle of a painting.

“Wait a second,” she said just after picking up the phone. There was a long pause as she pored over a partly formed horse herd and perhaps made a brushstroke or two. “Okay, I’m ready to talk.”

Hudson works from photographs that she takes on journeys through the Colorado countryside. For the horse painting, she’d first done a charcoal study of a photo. The black-and-white image became her reference for the painting, allowing her to add vibrant colors where she pleased.

A week later, Hudson was on our front stoop with paintbrush in hand. We weren’t surprised by the swooping, intuitive way she wielded the brush, but her confident application of blocks of intense color was astounding.

This video shows Hudson adding bright blue highlights onto the deep red bodies of some longhorns. Watch the neo-Expressionist at work.

“Motion and Emotion” ends on July 30th. Stop by Waxlander to see Andrée Hudson’s beautiful acrylics before it’s too late!

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Spinners - Andree Hudson

When gallery goers see Andrée Hudson’s work, they fall in love with her masterful manipulation of oils. Except they’re not oils.

“People are like, ‘Those aren’t acrylics!’ and I’m like, ‘Yes they are!’” says Hudson.

Hudson used oils most of her life, but got concerned about their toxicity when she had her two daughters. It’s hard to believe, but the only paint that touches her pallet nowadays is acrylic.

More viewers will surely make the same mistake at Hudson’s “Motion and Emotion,” her one-woman show that opens Friday. Whether she’s capturing solitary people, stampeding animals or expansive landscapes, the artist paints with thick, swirling strokes that lend her subjects a soft luminosity.

Wild West - Andree Hudson

The effect is striking on some of her larger canvases. Cows stampede and bicycle racers surge as though they’re going to shatter their frames, but Hudson’s tender light dissipates the adrenaline.

“Everything has a lot of movement, but you can’t hear anything,” says Hudson. Viewing the paintings becomes a chance to dwell within the power of a single moment.

This is especially true of Hudson’s portraits, which show western women in idle moments. Their eyes look off into the distance or else down into their laps as they ponder great existential mysteries. Perhaps they themselves are wondering, “Could I really be acrylic?”

Andree Hudson’s “Motion and Emotion” runs from July 17 to July 30. Join us on Friday, July 20 for the artist reception from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm.

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Majestic Morning - Michael Ethridge

Michael Ethridge is a painter, but he could also be classified as a visual chef.

“The abstract is like a food to me, a really good food,” he says. “When you have a good food and you can’t stop thinking about it, and you can’t sleep for it.”

Ethridge’s recipes are elaborate: he’ll mix up a batch of paint and apply a layer, let it set overnight, and then paint another—and another. He works from light to dark, from flat to highly defined. A pallet knife is his spatula as he blends and folds thick ribbons of paint together.

“I try to draw the eye to a single focal point,” he explains. In the final confection, the centerpiece is often a particularly defined twist or swirl of paint. These flourishes look like whimsical ideas that were caught on the brink of taking shape, or maybe they’re peculiar flowers atop a vibrant layer cake.

Like any good chef, Ethridge is also a bit of a showman.

“So many artists are introverts, but I’m the opposite,” he explains. “When I paint in public, I feel like I’m giving a gift to the people.”

Every day this week, Ethridge will be sharing his visual feast on the sidewalk outside Waxlander. Come meet this award-winning artist and watch him paint. The week will culminate in an Artist’s Reception at Waxlander on Friday, July 13th, from 5-7 p.m. Delicious!

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Waiting for You - Andree Hudson

Andrée Hudson’s artwork is a study in contrasts. She paints seated figures deep in thought, but also herds of stampeding cows. She matches subdued blues and greens with nearly neon pinks and oranges. She casts riding cowboys into landscapes made of hazy, abstract atmosphere.

Hudson’s upcoming show “Motion and Emotion” at first seems like a chance to study these dualities, with her animals showing frantic pathos and her sitters exhibiting deep ethos. But just as the show’s title is a Russian doll of sorts, so the ideas begin to blend as you take in the paintings.

Hudson’s varied artistic training is a clue to this swirling sensibility.

“I’ve been working in oils since I was a little kid,” says Hudson, who grew up in Annapolis. When she was in first grade, one of her images was projected at the front of the Smithsonian Museum. In high school she was commissioned to paint portraits and murals.

Hudson changed course in college, studying illustration and visual communication at the Maryland Institute of Art. She was so talented at capturing skeletal and muscular form that she was soon drawing for medical publications and textbooks.

“That was to pay the bills,” she says with a laugh. The training influenced her oils at the time, though. “If you look at my old stuff, I was much tighter.”

Now Hudson lives in the foothills of Denver, and her painting style has shifted to match Colorado’s colorful landscape and people. Her brushstrokes are broad and gestural, her colors utterly expressionistic.

Starburst - Andree Hudson

“I get my energy from the cowboys and the horses out here,” Hudson says. She’ll take her camera out in the field to capture people, animals and landscapes. Back in the studio she lets her imagination choose the vibrant colors that bring her subjects to life. “My colors are not real at all, it’s all in my head,” she says.

It’s these colors that tie together the works in “Motion and Emotion.” Whether it’s the mysterious cowgirl of “Waiting For You” or the stolid “Canyon Longhorns,” her subjects all bask in the vibrant rays of the high desert sun. In these full but tender hues, everything holds a joyful sensuality.

“A lot of times I’m painting longhorns, and they remind me of ballerinas,” says Hudson. “I think horses are very sensuous, but it’s just something about the way cows run towards you that looks like a dance.”

Insights like these burst from Hudson’s canvases. Even her running animals or racing bikers seem caught in a single moment of time that’s preserved in paint. They give you a chance to pause and consider each subject’s story.

For Hudson, these moments are most gripping when they bubble up from unknown places.

“Sometimes the paintings just appear, and I have no idea how they were created,” says Hudson. “I think that’s where you reach that euphoria.”

Hudson pauses for a moment, lost in thought.

“Or maybe the painting’s already there, and I just went through the motions to paint it out,” she says.

Do Hudson’s paintings materialize, or are they buried deep in her head? Or both? It’s hard to say, but that’s the beauty of a Hudson.

Andree Hudson’s “Motion and Emotion” runs from July 17 to July 20, 2012. Join us on Friday, July 20 for the artist reception from 5 – 7pm.

Canyon Longhorns - Andree Hudson

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