Sue Vesely discusses life, bodies and motivation with Craig Kerrecoe...
CK: You rely heavily upon the human figure in your work and have said 'the body is a monument'. A monument to what?
SV: To itself. To our humanity. It's the evidence of who we are. The mind is invisible. To celebrate a good mind and it's effects and actions, we make a statue of the body of the person with that mind. And it goes further, that statue becomes public property. So we all own the image, the monument is ours and a path to that mind is forged through the representation of the body.
CK: Is the body the only evidence of our existence?
SV: No, our culture is the general result of our existence, and making art and monuments is a part of that general evidence.
CK: Are you trying to leave evidence of your own existence?
SV: Most definitely. I have always thought that I was an artist, from my earliest thoughts. I think this started because I could always draw and people remarked on it when I was 2 or 3. It's natural to me to make art, it's my idea of who I am and when I don't work I get a sense of failure. So I feel that what I do is a life's work, there's no choice. But recently I've sort of grown up a bit out of the "do it because you are driven" mentality, and I've been thinking about what I really mean by the act of communication.
CK: Did something occur to cause this shift in thinking?
SV: Well, when you've been working for a long time your original motivation develops into something different, into something relevant to who you are now. As a young artist, I was amazed by the visual world, the appearance of anything and every thing was a reward and source of inspiration. I could make a picture out of anything, because the subject matter did not change the thing that I was doing, which was seeing in a certain way, and putting down a visual equivalent to my thoughts about the source material.
CK: What changed?
SV: The enquiry you make when you look at something and try to make an equivalent of the essence of what you see, is a journey that never ends. I started to put figures into my pictures because I found that this added a dimension to the power of the appearance of things. Objects not only had their own mystifying essences, but you could put a person in there to show how it felt to be in that room close to those things. And not even get into trouble for it. I naturally used my own body to feel the pose I was painting.
CK: Do you use models?
SV: No. I have never used models in my paintings. All the female figures were me.
CK: So how did this style develop?
SV: The work developed so that the figure became the starting point, the organisation of space around the figure became the essential natural world. As I got older, I was less and less interested in myself and my physical being, more interested in humanity generally. I needed to be consciously in control of my decisions, my brain had taken over.
CK: The introduction of the human figure in your work must have been an important step for you.
CK: It's interesting that you have altered the motivation behind the act of communication, without, ostensibly at least, changing the aesthetic result of the act of that communication. Many Artists, in the course of creative development, would find a way to achieve alternative results without changing the motivation, the conceptual process they go through to achieve that result. It's an important distinction to make. Artistic growth need not necessarily affect the actual art 'product'. It can, instead, inform the reasoning behind and the understanding of the end result. You mention that your art has become less about you and more about humanity in general. Is that change a result of your shifting focus for what you paint, or vice versa?
SV: This gets to the matter of how artists function. The process of change informed my shift in focus. Thoughtless repetition isn't painting. Re-evaluation should be a constant element of our working mentality.
CK: You are suggesting that all Artists should be constantly challenging themselves, always asking a new question?
SV: Ideally every new picture should be an enquiry. So change is necessary, and my change has been internal, because my tools did not need to change. The format of the work looks similar because the world hasn't changed, but my understanding of it has.
CK: How has it changed you?
SV: Well, I am less important in the process, I don't need all the props and rituals I used to use in the studio. Also, the only way to work
with small children around is to get on with it unceremoniously. My kids are big now, but the habit has stayed. I'd like to say that after
all this talk about the intellectual construction we put on how visual work is made, that that could just be for the nurture of the maker, and it's not vital that the viewer knows about it.
CK: How come?
CK: What do you require from the viewer?
SV: I'm interested in the idea that I can use existentialism to dig into the viewers subconscious. If I paint things that the viewer thinks he
has seen before as part of his own life, then the feeling is that the picture is about him. Then I can show him my reality. A lot of people
say my pictures remind them of their dreams, so I think it's working.
CK: Are they drawn from your dreams too?
is not usually that direct or simple . Normally I have to think of a subject and start to respond to it consciously.
CK: What do dreams mean to you?
SV: When people have a moving dream that is a dream of a new experience, the mind is practising to cope with things that might happen, things we may know about intellectually but have not experienced emotionally. For instance, what it is like to loose a child or to kill someone. These dreams are profoundly affecting and quite infrequent.
CK: Is that the effect you aim to have with your painting?
SV: I think my paintings have a little bit of that effect on the viewer and that is what people mean when they say they are reminded of their dreams.
CK: Are you still changing, asking new questions?
SV: I hope so, let's see.
(2006)