Talking with Suzanne Stryk at Blue Spiral 1 during the May Downtown Gallery Stroll was interesting in part because the subject of art never came up. We conversed about literature, about nature, about the easy chair she had set up in anticipation of a visit by her father-in-law, the accomplished poet Lucien Stryk.
I missed an opportunity to learn more about her art directly, an art which is among the most exciting ever shown in Asheville. Instead, I learned something about the breadth of sympathy from which Stryk’s art rises, her eclectic enthusiasm, her delight, amounting nearly to lust, for the things of the world, which allows those things to manifest in her work such precise and evocative presence.
Though she has passed through insect, serpent and antelope stages, Stryk’s subjects in the present show are birds for the most part. The presentation is metonymic, which is to say that the birds are represented at once by their own images and by things that appertain to them, by eggs and feathers, in one case, most beautifully, by the forest they may inhabit.
The rendering goes beyond flawless. The eggs gleam with strata of glazes. Details of the feathers are sometimes deliberately out of focus, as though they were fluttering in the wind, or still attached to a living bird. Sometimes the pieces feel like Etruscan tomb paintings, sometimes like pages from the notebook of a Victorian gentleman naturalist, stained and much folded, scrawled with notes, enriched with text, the birds displayed as though initially aids to memory. Stryk said in an interview given in February at the Spartanburg County Museum of Art, “I recall struggling to identify a little greenish-yellow bird—was it a goldfinch, a warbler or a vireo? Funny now that it gave me so much trouble. And while a name in itself doesn’t mean much, the importance was that learning names was a way of noticing subtle distinctions and developing an awareness of other creatures’ existence. From that time on I no longer felt that people were the center of the universe.”
Whatever Stryk is painting is the center of the universe. The painstaking precision and inventiveness of her technique is at the service of her birds in a way that most contemporary artists have neither the modesty nor the skill to emulate.
