Susan Mareneck
Living in the Sawmill River Valley for the past forty years has grounded my life in the yearly cycle of natural and cultivated wonders. I have weathered the years in an 18th century house built by a blacksmith who fought in the Revolutionary War at age fourteen. For thirty years between September and June, I taught art and raised two children in New York City. My work tells the story.
From paintings of place and stories of life, the imagery evolved into abstraction and back. Time is the message and creates the form - time carved out to paint in layers when the children were young, time manifest in the marks we make as we shape materials and experience, lingering in memory and artifacts. I began to incorporate actual pieces of china, metal, glass, past detritus that surfaced around the house on Dickinson Road, crumbs from the 18th century town tax records I archived, bricks, tile, metal from construction sites in Manhattan where history often was lost, and from archives where it was preserved. I collected these treasures, weaving them through my life into new images.
The theme continues to “drill down”, through the layers of experience, the death of friends, births of grandchildren, the opening of compassion and grief. Our stories can be presented in image, but live in our hearts in the relationships to people and places present and in memory. The passion for connection is my story. One recent commission offered the opportunity to create a symbolic image in gold leaf on glass with reverse painting. It depicted the best intentions (known in organizational lingo as a “strategic plan”) of a three hundred year old Episcopal parish church in Manhattan. The glass was cut into 80 pieces and each fragment, framed with a print of the whole composition, was given - as a touchstone for keeping the vision alive - to the men and women who had conjured the future out of the past.
