CreationOvation interviews Susan Soffer Cohn
Susan Soffer Cohn and I met last year when we were members of The Artists’ Studio. It was my first experience belonging and working a gallery and co-op. She stood out. Although her art is bright and unique, it was her bright and unique personality that made me take notice. She asked me questions about my art; I asked about hers. She’s a good listener. Her work is unpretentious. She is modest. Susan’s abstract work lets you build your own story for it. I learned that she’s an uncomplicated person with a rich background just like her art.
What are you looking forward to doing outside of your art?
I just took a class about living to be 120 years old and part of what it says is you need to set a date and plan to live fully, and your best life for that period of time.
Right. Decades ago when a person turned 60, 65 you were expected to retire and you would seriously really retire, sit in your lounge chair and watch TV for the rest of your life.
This class told a story about a man who retired at age 65 and went home and sat down. And then when he turned 95 he looked back and was furious he had wasted 30 years doing nothing. Then he started to live more fully at 95.
Is he still alive?
I don’t know but my mother-in-law just had her 105th birthday. I know that it’s not farfetched to live this long because I’ve been to many 100th birthday parties.
I have a degree in English, writing, and I was a writer for a very long time and I have a Master’s in Business Administration… I sold my business, started another one and my son started running that business [a real estate development business] so I can live my fantasy life. Financially I’m not strapped. I have been, but not at this point in my life.
You know when they talk about starving artists and that kind of thing—of course it’s great to be a Warhol where everybody buys for huge amounts of money while you’re alive. But my goal is to be on the ladder. I figure we study and study. I didn’t start studying art until I was in my 50s, but once I did I felt like I had to catch up with all the young kids. I’m very focused and I’ve painted every single day since my first lesson that my husband bought for me at a fundraiser.
I ended up with the master teacher and she tricked me. I went in and I said [to her], “Okay, I don’t have any talent. I’m a writer and I just want to learn how to do stick figures to show somebody else what I need illustrated.”
I didn’t have any innate drawing talent, hands shake, and it wasn’t anything I saw in my future. After the lessons, I continued to go to her lessons once a week and in between I would paint every day. After a year, I walked in one day and the teacher just laughed. I told her someone asked if I was an artist and I said, “No!”
The teacher said, “Susan, have you looked at your work lately?” And that was the day.
You told that story before and I love it because it’s a similar story with most people. They think, “I want to be an artist.” Since it doesn’t take much money, or space, or much time to be an artist. You just have to do it and then you are an artist. It’s a bizarre statement.
It is! They think artists are mysterious because they don’t understand it.
I figured out recently that everyone wants to be artistic. They are attracted to the mystic of it. (We laugh because I say it sarcastically.) It’s another bizarre thought to think artists are mysterious. Anyone can be artistic.
Yes! Yesterday I went to a Mahjong game day. The woman who ran it is not an artist but she’s so talented. Everything she did all day was beautiful from the members’ names on the table to the winner’s packages. Everything she did matched and was magnificently crafted. People can be artistic by just learning.
Someone asked me how I pick the colors… This one [pointing to a purple, orange, and green piece] is using a secondary triad. It’s just a study and color theory. I don’t think people expect you to say that and that’s an area of study. If you learn it and you can do it, it’s useful.
You use colors that people don’t often think go together. You use all the colors it seems in a single piece but it works. I believe learning about color is a gradual, experimental, practice kind of study.
Oh my gosh! I took this 5-day workshop from Stephen Quiller and I was lost for four and half days and at the very end I just pulled it all together. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Of course, and then I do black and white stuff which has a lot of color. The movement and composition of it all is colorful. Anyway, getting back to the question I asked you earlier. Your answer is that you are not planning something. It’s just that you will do something. You’re not winding down and acting your stereotypical age.
As we study, we’re standing on the shoulders of all those people—the century of artists that came before us and centuries of artist that will come after us and I want to be a part of the ladder. I want someone on my shoulders. I want to add something to the future.
“Change” is huge. “Save” is huge so that’s why my tag is “Make a Difference”, small difference, any difference. Just make one. We can’t predict whether that difference will be good or bad but obviously if you make good things, there will be more good things. Being a rung on a ladder may not seem glorious but it can make the smallest difference that will lead to a great one. Be a support to a great person—to a great change.
What motivates you? Don’t say “passion”. I tell you what I say when people ask me, “What drives you? What motivates you? What’s your passion?” I say that I don’t know. It’s something so inane as, “I have to?” Every waking moment I need to create something, draw something, paint something, write, take a picture, put stuff together. It’s not a thing that pushes me. It just is what it is… unexplainable.
I had this mentor for five years—this magical woman. She died after that five years. She told me I was one the most focused people she’d ever met.
How do you get there? I mean it’s not her. She’s not what drove you. You already had that so, how?
But she did. She’s in my head every day.
It really is this one person?
Well she was one of many. I had teachers before but I’m very impatient. What I’m saying is I don’t have time to stay way back here. You have to give me the lessons…so that I can build on them. She said to me, “Of all the students I’ve had from all over, you’re the one that’s going to make it.” When somebody says that to you and it’s in my head all the time. It’s like an obligation. I hear lots of artists speak and they don’t say anything. Most of them do not teach anything.
She taught me how to teach [and] how to be in a show. She taught me about mats and color, different colors of white. I have these five years with this woman who also got me through cancer when I couldn’t do anything. Victor [husband] would take me to her and even though I could barely sit up, I’d do some little painting. I don’t know how I could complete it but it was because she was inside my head. She’s always telling me, “Make sure that you’ve got an arabesque and that it goes all the way through the painting.” She’s the driving force for me…
(I mean, my first teacher, Jayne Behman, was fabulous. She’s the one that made it happen.)
…I heard this woman speak and it changed, significantly, what I was doing. Watching her in one of those 45-minute presentations. I called her and she said, “Well, I’m taking a group to Spain and when I get back, let’s talk…and I’ll have a Wednesday. The first one will be on me and we’ll see if we get along.” (laughing) It was just love.
Yea, you can love people you don’t know well.
People dream of having a mentor like this.
We talked about money and you said you’re not strapped, but money isn’t the only thing that holds us back. Time and physical limitation aside, if you could do anything, what would you do?
I’ve painted a lot all over the world. I love traveling when I can. My work has been to places but I don’t get to go with it. I would probably go more, with my pieces. Like when I had a show in Italy I didn’t get to go with.
When or what, in your entire life, was the most inspiring thing you’d ever seen. The thing that you constantly go back to?
Summers in Wisconsin.
Is that where you grew up?
No, I went to summer camp there since I was 10 and it was really beautiful. It was a girl’s camp. It encouraged leadership, experimenting, and learning, and trying things that you never thought you’d like. Float trips down Wisconsin River and camping by Kettle Moraine where a glacier comes in flat. Watching shooting stars and campfires. Those kinds of times go with you and I still have friends from that time. I have contact with them every day from that part of my life, still. The last year I spent like that I was 17 so it was from a long time ago.
It doesn’t so much inspire you as it gives you energy when you reflect on that time. That saying where you’re the sum of all your experiences—you have such wonderful positive experiences. You’re really charmed and blessed.
I am. I had this rich experience. My grandmother was this incredible role model as well. She was a widow. She basically raised two children and started a business and but all of her eight siblings into businesses. She helped all of them. She put me to work with her. Sometimes I’d sleep over and I see her with her books all over the table trying to get everything down. I went on her buying trips—
You had a lot of strong women around you.
I went to a girl’s camp and a girl’s college. I think it was my grandmother’s influence that really—I mean it was the 50s—to not have to compete with boys and be able to have leadership training because it was a time when women were sent back home. I had a grandmother that was working all the time. She burned coffee: she was a terrible cook. She had somebody work for her so she would have good food in the house.
I notice that strong women—not all, but some—who run a business, produce a lot in the work arena, and have goals that are huge, are often not good cooks. Not that they can’t, it’s just… why is that?
It’s just not what I do. I can cook okay. I just… I get really impatient. I don’t think it’s bad to be a good cook. I just do so much art. I worked, had two kids, and it’s just not important to me.
Why do you think art is so important to you?
Art matters. If you have a culture without art, there’s a big loss in humanity.
That’s a very big answer but I want to know why on a personal level. Why do you want so much to be an artist? You said you want to be one of the rungs on the ladder so why?
Because I study things very intensely. I gave a lesson in one of my classes in patterns, seeing patterns in art. I brought in history books from every era and I asked the students to find repetitions in pattern. And it’s always there. We talked about this copyright on this Zentangle… and it’s ridiculous. It’s a historical thing since the cave drawings—a recording of history and a part anthropology, of human existence. It’s not going to matter that much that an individual lived during this period in time. But, if I can contribute some idea that someone hasn’t had before, a way of taking history and putting into a different form so that people want to learn it.
Right. If you’re an inspiration you don’t necessarily have to be the whole ladder to make a difference. Being a rung on the ladder is something. You’ll have given a young girl who in 25 years will say, “I had this incredible mentor.” Susan Cohn: a rung to step on.
I did this show and this little girl came up and she wanted to know which ones I had done. I told her I had done all of them. “All of them?” she said. She was running to this one and that one and saying how she liked them all. I asked her why she like this particular one and she said that it had a tree. And asked her about the next one and she said she saw a castle. I asked her to tell me a little bit about the castle and she told me a story. Then she went to the next one. She had a story for every painting. Which is what I want. I don’t want to go up to it and say, “Oh, it’s a house.” It’s boring. That’s why I don’t like landscape. Some of them are brilliant but ninety-percent are boring. I am tired of landscape art. Plen air stuff… dreadful.
Joyce Welsh’s stuff, of course, is wonderful.
Joyce’s stuff is really special.
We’re going to wrap this up with this last question but I’ll preface it with: Did you ever see The Intern where this older retired widower goes for a job interview at a young, hip, dotcom company to get an internship position? And one the questions they ask him is, “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” The interviewer realizes how odd the question is in the present scenario and, somehow, inappropriate. But you’re going live to be 120 years old. (laughing) But you get how funny that kind of question can be? So, I’m not going ask you that!
A few years from now, where do you want to be? Tell me where you’re going to be and what you’ll be doing.
The place I’m going… where I’ve been. The reason I’m strategically doing what I’m doing is because I want my work to be in a lot of houses and businesses. I’m in a lot already but I want to be in more. I’m in two museum collections and I want to be in more. I think that’s the objectives under the goal of “ladder”. I can’t be on the ladder if no one ever sees it. Nobody ever knows that I was there.
When my paintings have a life of their own and move to a new home and they’re in a new place, the most exciting thing for me is to be invited there to see where they are because they’re in a different environment and to see how it finishes the cycle. You do all the work and when it gets there and it’s happy and they’re happy. All the work and studying pays off. You’re completing a cycle.