Susan Synarski - Nice Girl's Don't

Susan Synarski's art explores personalities and situations she might otherwise never experience. Growing up as a proper little "air force brat", she still carries some of this nice girl baggage with her. But her heart is with the 'other." Moving from base to base and school to new school as a child, and living as a Lesbian need I spell out that she knows something about the "other."

Susan is an artist and illustrator. As an illustrator she recently had the perfect job dropped into her lap, Booty: Girl Pirates on the High Seas by Sara Lorimer. The client, Chronicle Books, was seeking a fun accessible, unusual approach to this book. The book covers real girl pirates from 1500 through the late 19th century. Most of the women dressed and lived as men. Three Asian women ran a fleet of pirate ships; Rachel Ward was the last woman hanged in Massachusetts in 1789. Susan' favorite is Sadie the Goat. Sadie never even went out on the high seas; although she wanted to. Sadie read about pirates and emulated them as best she could. Her name comes from her MO of butting victims in the stomach with her head after which her band of male thugs would frisk the victims. Sadie housed her band of pirates in lower Manhattan's "Bloody" 4th Ward. At night they would steal onto ships and burglarise them.

After years of illustrating other people's concepts, Susan realised that she had drifted away from her own free-associated, non-verbal concept work. A friend recommended Art and Fear, a book encouraging quantity over quality; quality is bound to come. And as is seen from Susan' meticulous, detail oriented work, this obsessive artist never misses a beat on quality. Huge canvases being intimidating and time consuming, Susan turned to small gouache paintings. She paints intuitively without sketching first; a welcome relief from rounds of preliminary sketches submitted to art directors throughout the years. Susan found herself creating little portraits.

Burglar is a perfect example of exploring the forbidden, the bad girl, the "other" through a lovely little gem of a portrait. Starting with a vague idea of nigh, criminality and how to manifest something extremely embarrassing, she worked her way through to this redheaded burglar being caught in her underwear during a burglary.

The analogy of her paintings and Indian miniatures is not lost on Susan. She is attracted to the iconic nature of tiny, formal portraits and goddess paintings but adding her own twist. Scarlet and Mrs. Jones are good examples. Scarlet with her gold jewelry, evening dress and chandelier is accompanied by a scarlet letter "A" - speaking of bad girls. In Blue Bird the nod to Asian art is taken further as a sun-faced female goddess figure rides a blue bird.

As per the philosophies of the east she appreciates the pantheon of Hindu gods and goddesses as a means of representing complex and repressive concepts - Kali is a favorite - but she is most attached to Buddhism, although not a practising Buddhist. Pictorially, she enjoys the peaceful pose of Buddha adding her own unexpected twists as in Green Buddha and Volcano. But mostly she enjoys Buddhism’s instruction to reconcile the terrible, the challenges of life, fear and find peace. And this is exactly what she explores in her paintings.