Arts ENCORE
Suzanne Siegel
Painter finds intersection of reality and imagination
K
Courtesy
alamazoo painter Suzanne Siegel is striding past a retrospective of her work hanging on the walls in a hall that leads to Friendship Village’s Kiva Auditorium. Looking at the breadth of the paintings, one might be tempted to think the artist, who turns 70 this month, has reached a point of comfort with her craft, that’s she’s settled in or is on autopilot. That assumption would be wrong. “This year, 2014, has been the most productive and creative year of my life actually,” she says. “It’s been kind of the zenith of my career.” Siegel is probably best known for her interpretive realist urban landscape paintings with their multi-layered images depicting silent urban scenes set against glowing twilight blue backgrounds. They look real, but Siegel warns viewers not to trust their eyes. “People always tell me my paintings look ‘just like’ the buildings or landscapes they’re of, but I change a lot actually, based on aesthetic,” she explains. One of the paintings featured in Siegel’s 2015 calendar, which features 12 of her luminous images, depicts a pristine, placid landscape portrait of Portage Creek. And while it is as luminous as her urban nightscapes, the painting is representative of a new direction 32 | Encore DECEMBER 2014
This painting of Kalamazoo’s Civic Auditorium by interpretive realist painter Suzanne Siegel is featured in the artist’s 2015 calendar.
for Siegel, a series of paintings in which she takes liberties with the “reality” of the image. Her new “Images for Contemplation” series offers natural landscapes represented in daylight in which Siegel uses opacity in the place of transparency for a softer, layered effect. In Siegel’s Portage Creek painting, light plays off water and sky, illuminating the trees and bushes surrounding the scene. Siegel says someone told her, “Wow! That looks just like that area — I walk past it every day.” But Siegel told her to look again on her next walk. “Right next to the trees are some ugly warehouses,” says Siegel. “I’m not painting any old, ugly warehouses, thank you very much, so I just moved the trees over to complete a natural look.” The next time Siegel ran into that person, she said she was amazed that it looked so different because her mind accepted the painting as reality. That’s exactly the type of effect — joining memory and imagination — for which Siegel has been striving. “I pull together elements from sometimes over 100 different photos to make a painting,” she says. “The end result has a look of