Who is Susan Shie?
I'm a painter, and I also sew. I've done both, as well as lots of drawing, writing, and clay work, since I was a small child. My art tells stories about my life and the world around me, from my vantage point in Northeast Ohio. My work has become like time capsules of the life around me, including my political commentary and private stories. Both of my degrees are in Studio Art, specifically Painting, from The College of Wooster (BA 1981) and Kent State University School of Art (MFA 1986). But I consider myself to be an Outsider Artist, because I don't fit in with either what we think of as the current painting tradition or with the regular art quilt part of the art world.
Like a child of mixed races, my work is a hybrid not necessarily at home or accepted by either culture. And for me, I think that feels better than being like the others. I think I like to run along the perimeters like a bit of a wild thing, embracing my difference from the status quo. I know the accepted ways bore me and make me itch to rebel, to breathe! I've been making what I now see as Outsider Art Quilts since 1980, and my current work, coming through a natural progression of development, has turned full circle, to look a LOT like the paintings I was making as a young woman. Only now they have writing all over them. Oh, and you can fold them up, since they're soft, because I've kept the quilt format I've been using for many years now. My work is painted (and sewn) on fabric, but not fastened to stretcher bars, like it was when it was painted on canvas, when I was young. (OK, I admit I still like to paint on stretched canvas sometimes, too, but I keep those pieces small, coz I'm not about to build wooden crates for my big pieces! Those babies are "quilts.")
I write as much as I possibly can on my work, usually beginning the art by drawing first with an airbrush on cotton fabric, then airbrush painting the colors in, and writing over the colors with my airpen, making whole cloth quilted paintings. But sometimes I use paint markers for the first line drawing, and sometimes I choose regular brushes to paint in the colors. I always prefer airpen for the tiny writing with crispy rich lines, which I add to the piece a little at a time, over several days to several months. I mostly machine quilt my paintings or sell them unsewn, as frameble paintings. I really prefer machine "crazy grid" quilting now for sewing the great big pieces I started doing in 2005. I still like to add a row of hand sewn running stitches with perle cotton, around the edges of my art quilts, as my way of finishing the work, and as a nod to all the hand sewing I used to do.
I used to embellish my work with not only huge amounts of hand stitching, but also lots and lots of tiny glass beads. It took many months to finish most of my pieces then. But now I prefer to let the detail created by my airpen writing and drawing to be what intrigues the viewer, and the sewing has become very secondary to the painted composition in my current work. This switching to machine quilting is because I've realized that it's the storytelling: the pictures and the writing, which are important to me. Not how the piece is sewn, not the texture. Anyhow, the tiny writing itself makes a new texture, which I'm enjoying exploring the strengths of, when you consider that the viewer may not read it at all. Now it doubles as pattern.
