by Katherine Mesch

Upon returning from a yearlong mission abroad, Suzy Schultz decided not to return to the life she’d been living. A math teacher from Atlanta, Schultz suddenly realized that she wanted to live a life of creativity. “In Poland, I was exposed to a very different way of life,” she says. “The arts were a part of every day, not just events to be attended. Without being able to buy a lot of material things, people would make things for each other, have parties where they’d share poetry and short films. I don’t think I even realized it at the time, but it inspired something in me about how I wanted to live when I came back”.

After floundering for a while, tutoring part time and working in a frame shop, Schultz began to do freelance design work at the encouragement of her mentor, Jud Lamos, a friend working in publications at a missionary organization. Six years later, Lamos encouraged her to make another career change, this time to take the bold steps to becoming a full-time painter.

“He was about to leave to go on a mission. He said, ‘Do you want to be an artist? Do you want to starve? Is it worth it to you? Because you could stay here, and do a lot of typesetting and proofing and maybe even a painting every once in a while. But I don’t think that’s what you should do. You have two months and then you’re gone. You need to be painting full time.’ That was back in November of ‘95. I’ve been painting full time ever since.”

A Brave New Start

When Schultz left her graphic design position, she left a comfortable work environment where she knew evHome Artwork Bio/Resume Articles Contact Gallery Representation eryone and a mentor who’d helped her find herself. At roughly the same time, she broke off a relationship with a man she’d been dating. “It seemed like everything familiar was gone,” she says. “Those were a dark couple of years. It was a time when I was forced to re-evaluate a lot of things. Things that were familiar were being taken away, so I had to learn to find the things in my life that really grounded me.”

She first painted a series of aging African-Americans and weathered doors and windows. “I sought out subjects that had that tension of going through something - weathering and suffering - and yet were still beautiful,” she says. “And maybe that’s because at the time I was in that weathering stage and needed something that gave me hope and that would cause beauty in me as well.”

Today Schultz’s intense watercolors are characterized by tight, detailed figures that flow out into the page in a loose, emotional charge. The style is a remnant of her first days painting, when the looseness was a result not of deliberate technique, but of energy and a will to express something that went beyond the meager technique she’d developed. Now she works for the contrast between the tightly rendered figures and expressive backgrounds, constantly striving to retain the early passion and innocence that propelled her career.

But as Schultz learned long ago, making a living as a painter is about more than passion and drive. “The first few years were really rough, trying to figure out how I could earn money painting what I wanted to paint - people.” Schultz began by targeting three different venues for selling her work. The first was the fine art venue - galleries, outdoor shows and juried exhibitions. The second was editorial illustration. She contacted a variety of magazines, sent them her work, and followed up with phone calls. The third market was commissioned portraits, passed on mostly by work of mouth. Slowly, her paintings began to sell.

An Endless Source

Schultz finds new inspiration in every work she begins, always relating her subjects’ circumstances to her own. Her most current work involved figures placed in an environment where they don’t belong, the juxtaposition of something beautiful in an industrial space. “In the paintings there is a sense that there is hope - a light ray hitting the figure, showing that even in the midst of this environment, there is a glimpse of something, of finding something to hold onto, enough to keep you going on in the search.” Schultz says she knows that the paintings are a reflection of how she feels at a particular moment in her life. And right now she’s struggling with the tension between wondering why she’s here, mixed with a sense that she already knows. She wonders how she fits in, how something that seems to be desolate may really be filled with hope.

Although Schultz’s splashy use of watercolor lends an illusion of effortlessness, in reality, she often spends days on a single drawing, working and reworking fine details until her figures hold just the right curves. Such intense study often Home Artwork Bio/Resume Articles Contact Gallery Representation demands that she work from photographs, though Schultz says she’d rather work from life. “It’s all there in front of you,’ she says. “There’s an organic quality when you work from a model that you just can’t achieve by working from rolls of film - piecing details of the back and hands and arms together. I like to study the model, go over the figure in my head when I draw, so that by the time I start to paint, I’m so familiar that it just flows.”

Working Methods

After stretching Arches 140-lb. cold-pressed watercolor paper onto a piece of Gatorboard, Schultz begins with a small, detailed painting of the head, hands and parts of the figure, moving to a larger brush to paint carefully around the form. Once the figure is defined, she can work loosely with her brush, dripping and splattering the surface, making her last strokes the most spontaneous, careful not to overwork.

“I don’t always know when I’m done,” she says. “With some paintings, I think I could work on them for three months. But when I’m painting and starting to take away from the piece, instead of adding to it, then I know I have to be done. It’s an intuitive sense, something I feel when I’m losing interest because I’ve said all I have to say.”

Though she’ll also confess that she doesn’t always know what it is that she wants to say. Sometimes it’s more of a feeling or mood than a narrative that she wishes to capture, and she’ll spend long hours on a detail that doesn’t feel just right. For the painting Reflection (on the previous page), Schultz spend hours reworking the wrought iron reflection on the floor. “I didn’t want it to feel as if he were in jail,” she says, “The reflections shouldn’t be bars, but rather a door, not too desolate, something that can be opened.”

Right now, Schultz is working on her drybrush technique. “When I see Andrew Wyeth’s work,” she says, “I just want to cry. I’m so moved by how much time he spends, and how he can capture something with just one stroke that would take me or another artist maybe 50.” She also looks to the work of Hubert Shuptrine and Steven Scott Young for inspiration for using a thicker application of paint and accomplishing a more expressive style.

Making a Living

Schultz sells her paintings regularly now, but in the beginning, the sales were few and far between. “I used up my savings in less than six months,” she says. “Fortunately, I have parents that would never let me be homeless.” With a little help with her health insurance and a few well-timed checks in the mail, Schultz was able to rent studio space - the best decision she made for her career. “I found that what always keeps me from painting was that painting was very intimidating. But now what was more intimidating was worrying about what I was going to eat next week and how I was going to keep a roof over my head.” Without any alternative, Schultz developed a strict schedule of painting time, one that she still follows today.

She spends eight to 10 hours a day working in her studio, a small section of a converted warehouse that’s been divided up and rented to area artists. Huge 4 x 8-foot windows flood the room with natural light, and a community of artists surrounds her. Writing the monthly rent checks reminds her that this is a serious business; it’s real and she’s got to work to keep it. The schedule and her rigid adherence to it sometimes feels burdensome, but it keeps her from sitting around, worrying about how she’s going to make it.

With steady sales, Schultz’s success has changed her lifestyle little. She still uses the same store-brand brushed and works in the same tiny space. The one indulgence she affords herself is her collection of music. “I don’t know how many CDs I have in my studio, but I love having good music to paint by,” she says. She listens to the local classical station during the day, when the light is good and the sounds of the street filter into the warehouse. But at night she puts on something emotional and beautiful. “Flamenco, maybe, or something soft and intense like Over the Rhine or impassioned like the Cirque du Soleil soundtrack,” she says. “It creates an almost surreal environment.”

Often, Schultz walks through the old neighborhood surrounding the warehouse, passing construction sites and the men who work there. “I’ve always been curious about people, which is probably why I paint people,” she says. “I wonder what their stories are and what they’ve gone through.” A friend owns a warehouse around corner, and Schultz goes there with models to do photo shoots for the large paintings she’s working on now, some as big as 3 x 6 feet. A flamenco dancer against the backdrop of chemical drums, a woman wrapped in a blanket against the emptiness of a cold room, each portrayed in a shaft of clean, bright, hopeful light.