“Second Nature” The Art of Suzanne Stryk

MM: That said, then what is the primary or “first nature?”

SS: You might say it’s all that is wild, from stars to cicadas to our own bodies, and not a creation springing from our minds.

Most people assume science is closer to what you’re calling primary nature, yet science is also second nature. Data, gene sequences and graphs describing a salamander aren’t the salamander itself. As myth served for older cultures, science is a translation of nature, attempting to explain the mysterious.

Yet neither really tells us how the salamander experiences the world, although that doesn’t make our efforts any less important and fascinating.

I address these ideas in my work, juxtaposing wildness with scientific order, such as in “Shard Diptych,” where one side is a diagram of an insect, the other side wild, disordered, dark. “The Collector’s Confession” presents a similar contrast—the ordered section contains a book with notes and a collection of eggs, while in the top section feathers fly in dark space.

MM: Does your use of animal representations heighten or dispel the sense of the mythological within our culture? How do you discriminate between science and myth?

SS: From my first mature work such as the “Insect Collection” and “Double Helix” series, to my most recent paintings, I investigate those very questions. Science functions as myth in our culture—myth in the sense of an explanation of reality. In the “Prairie Cycle” paintings I explored how words and symbols function to draw us closer to nature but also separate us from it. To do so I invented a mythological antelope, filling its body with writing.

For a while in the 90’s my interest was in myths and legends about the natural world, represented in this exhibit by “Snake Doctor.” It was believed by early Southerners that dragonflies raised snakes from the ground Lazarus-style in spring. I’m intrigued by our impulse to transform observed natural phenomena into imaginative stories, and, by doing so, create new meanings.

MM: Well, do you think that science and art have any similarities within our culture?

SS: They have similarities in their creative process, both often beginning with the question: What If? What if I put these two chemicals together? What if I search a new habitat for a rare orchid? What if I combine two disparate images? What if I create an imaginary ladder made of feathers? When I painted “Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction” I wondered what ideas the feather ladder and the nest would trigger when surrounding the grackle.

Your question leads me to another thought: I feel people see the world of art and science as much too separate. After all, their origins were intertwined—the first people who drew on cave walls created images in order to understand and control nature—the first partnership of science and art.

In an interview, Jacques Cousteau was asked what he thought would make people more environmentally aware. I was surprised when he replied the study of the humanities. He suggested reading Kafka! Of course, what his comment implies is not that the study of science should be neglected, but rather should be coupled with the study of the arts. I agree—the arts and sciences should be partners in making people sensitive, imaginative and knowledgeable about the living world and the highest human potential.

MM: How important is your background, specifically your training as a scientific illustrator?

SS: Art school in the early 70’s was a tough time for an 18-year-old who wanted to paint bugs, toads, birds and turtles! Studio art teachers discouraged the precise biological imagery I was interested in. They preferred student’s big gestural abstractions or pop art images of celebrities, so I diverted my studies to art history, for which every paper I chose to write was about the representation of nature—birds in Egyptian tomb painting, origins of landscape painting in the early Renaissance, Brueghel’s Alpine studies, and so on.

By the early 80’s, still unable to merge my biological interests with the practice of fine art, I studied scientific illustration, and then worked for a university’s biology department. The patience required for that discipline remains with me in the studio to this day, along with the iconographic influence the arrows, labels, measurements, and grids that fill my images.

For those few years when my art materials were technical pens and Bristol board, while stippling the millions of dots on a leaf or scale, I used to think: What does this scientific drawing really say about the prairie plant swaying under the hot sun? What does my careful rendering of a turtle tell us about the dim, mysterious, prehistoric life of this creature? Doesn’t this drawing say more about us as a species of observers, than the turtle itself? I thought my mind was straying but I was in fact developing the concepts that would later become the core of my art.

MM: But though your work is detailed with seeming biological accuracy, it’s also full of mark-marking issues: brushstrokes, over-painting, and scumbling of fine art.

SS: Yes, I use paint and materials expressively—even the rather meticulous feathers or insects are juxtaposed with rougher textures, often divided into sections of the same panel. For example, the top half of “The Collector’s Calendar,” though full of biological notations and precise details, is created by scraping and scumbling paint to suggest a wall or fossil. In my recent series, “Genomes and Daily Observations,” I contrast the free marks of the umber stain with more realistic renderings of animals. The combination of different paint qualities, from the rough to the sensuously refined, relates to the different qualities I observe in nature.

One viewer described my work as realistic abstraction. You know, after all I’ve said, the colors, shapes, and textures are as much the theme of my work as anything. So I hope my paintings remain open to purely visual and personal responses of the viewer, as well as interpretations of the natural world.

MM: Earlier works show your use of gouache but now you use acrylics—why the change?

SS: I loved the suggestive surfaces of Morris Graves paintings and Persian miniatures, both painted with gouache, so I was inspired to use that medium when returning to personal artwork. Gouache allowed me to etch minute veins of a dragonfly’s wing, while creating flat dusty surfaces suggesting age and transience. From 1990 to 1997 I painted exclusively with gouache. Then I desired a greater object-quality for my work, a greater physical presence. So in 1997 I began to experiment with acrylics on wood panel, represented in this exhibit by the painting “Clone.” From then on I evolved a technique glazing with acrylics and building up surfaces with modeling paste.

MM: So your use of acrylic reflects your desire to be more visible to the viewer?

SS: That’s an interesting way of putting it, since people had to practically put their noses up to my gouache paintings to see them! I wanted my paintings to have a life both close-up and at a distance, to have a greater surface variety, which eventually led to my sculpting nests and wings in relief, and attaching actual books and plants to the surface of the paintings.

Hoping to involve the viewer even more directly led to my developing an installation approach to the “Genomes and Daily Observations” series, in which I place a naturalist’s desk and a mirror in the gallery space beside the grid of drawings.

MM: How have you seen your use of motifs change over the last 15 years?

SS: Last spring while thinking about preparing for this exhibit, “Second Nature,” I reflected on the main motifs preoccupying me for the past decade and a half. And the result is the painting “A Natural History,” a sixteen-panel piece exploring those recurring motifs. In it, I’ve lined up eggs and labeled them as if specimens in a museum collection. One panel has a shard to suggest age, another notations like my sketchbooks. I placed a hummingbird in a niche like an icon. A double helix twists down the side of a panel, yet another has a sculpted nest, and so on. These motifs have emerged throughout my artistic life, though the media and compositions have varied.

I’ve heard it said that a novelist has one story to tell and just keeps telling it in different ways. Perhaps my story, so to speak, is our species’ unique role witnessing the whole array of life on earth, and I keep envisioning different ways to tell it.