Susanna Baker: A Verona Artist Whose Time Is Now

“All my life, I’ve been a late bloomer,” said Verona artist Susanna Baker. “I had my children in my 40s and only now, at 51, do I identify myself to others as an artist.”

Anyone who has been hip to the area art scene knows that Baker’s time is now: Her beautiful and intriguing one woman show of over 20 mixed media works from her current series, “Cut and Embellished Monoprints” and “Universes 2010-2011” just opened at the prestigious JCC Gaelen Gallery’s Art Lobby and Exhibition Corridor, nearby in West Orange.

The show, which runs through April, follows closely on the heels of Baker’s co-curatorial debut (with Studio Montclair colleague Yvette Lucas) of “Hidden Worlds” at the equally prestigious Watchung Art Center. She was also part of two recent, juried group shows, “Art Connections 7” at the George Segal Gallery at Montclair State University and “Rendering Green,” still showing, at Studio Montclair’s Gallery @ Academy Square.

Q. Why now?

A. “I was always doing art and inside thought of myself as an artist, but I did not think I had done anything significant enough to call myself an artist. Now, with my younger child in half day kindergarten, I am doing art everyday and have the time to really focus.

Q. Let’s back up. What should we know about your early years?

A. I was the middle sister of three and came from a family where art was encouraged. My mother-- Phyllis Baker-- was an artist who we felt never showed enough; we felt she put her life as an artist on the back burner. For my mother, art was drawing from life. The nude was beautiful. We grew up with nudes all over the walls--it was art, we never thought about it. With two artist friends, Leona Mahler-Sussman and Don Trawin, she was part of the Cat’s Paw Studio, which did printmaking.

Our father, Howard Baker is now 81 and enjoying my and my sisters’ lives in the arts. He was always very supportive. He would have loved if I went to law school, but he was very happy when I was accepted at the Rhode Island School of Design, (RISD) where I was a painting major. (Baker holds a 1981 BFA from RISD.)

Q. What next?

A. “It was the 80s and didn’t want to live at home, and I had to support my going to clubs like the Red Bar… I didn’t want to do commercial or graphic art—maybe I thought it would dilute my ‘wonderful self.’

It was before you needed a graduate degree in computer science. After some courses in the field, I worked in Wall Street, starting at the American Stock Exchange. I worked 60 hour weeks for twenty years which enabled me to make the kind of money where I could retire young: I asked for a buyout when I was pregnant with my first child. I was 41, a single Mom by choice, and I am very proud of that decision. But naïve too, I had no idea of the time demands of an infant, and then a second child in 2005. I thought I could retire and paint.

Q. But all your life, you kept doing art?

A. Yes, when my mother was alive-- until 2000-- we took life drawing studio together at the Montclair Art Museum, and I also fell in love with printing there. I got press and began printmaking. After she died, I ultimately began printing with my mother’s Cat’s Paw Studio associates and now, we work together every Tuesday morning in my Verona studio. It’s a beautiful, special thing.

Q. You have other artist affiliations that are a beautiful thing; I know because I wrote about it for the Montclair Patch in my weekly art column there:   What would you like to share about Studio Group?

A. I have long been part of Studio Montclair. A few years ago, they started critique groups and I started going to what has become Studio Group.  We are 8 artists, including Yvette Lucas, and later Leona Mahler-Sussman joined the group, too. I wanted new feedback from artists who did not know my history or my work. I am so inspired by this group.

Q. Susanna, I think part of why your moment is now, is that your current art brings together both your years of honing your technical skills with your wide reading and many life experiences. Your work speaks compellingly to both the mind and the senses. Can you give a little sense of your goals?

A.

The best way I can answer that briefly, is to quote myself from my website: Currently, I am thinking a lot about alternate realities existing simultaneously. As I age, time becomes more fluid and reality more questionable. Keeping these thoughts in mind, I'm playing with layers and different views of the same image peeking through--In my work, I physically punch holes through one layer to reveal another, metaphorically breaking the thin veil of reality.”

You can learn more about Susanna Baker’s thoughts, techniques and see her complete series on her website www.susannabaker.com Complete information and a brief review of her one woman show at the JCC can be found at