Susan Belau
Edging, etching and watercolor, 5 x 4 inches, 2018
“Interactions and resonance of color creates space into the page, and this space can be an unknown space, or a changing and shifting space.”
Susan Belau is an artist living and working in San Francisco, California (USA). Her approach to color is a search for a secret ingredient and her approach to printmaking is methodical. Susan’s distilled, nuanced and landscape-based work is created through etching techniques and watercolor painting.
Currently Susan is working on a series of small etchings which focus on public lands, suburban streetscapes, government buildings and city squares. These works play with elements in the built environment that reflect practices of privacy, barriers and navigating shared space.
Are there specific associations towards color in your work?
The colors I use come from the quality of light here on the coast of Northern California. There’s a crispness and openness and space that comes from being so close to the ocean. Here on the west side of San Francisco, I get to see the Pacific Ocean every day, and witness the rich blues and silver greys of the water and sky.
In San Francisco, the distinctions between seasons are subtle, and don’t match what most think of, or experience as, typical seasonal cycles. Noticing seasonal changes means noticing changes in the light and feel of the air, rather than the temperature, and looking at distinct elements in the landscape rather than a sweeping change in the environment.
It is frequently warmer and sunnier in February than it is in July. The parks and gardens are green all year, while the colors of the surrounding hills go from green in the winter to golden in the summer. There is quite a bit of coastal fog here in the summer, and that also changes the colors and air. Fog veils the light, impacts the way we see space across distance, and brings everything close. I don’t usually use representational color or the local color of my subjects, but the colors I use are deeply tied to my observations of the nuances in the landscape and the qualities of light here in San Francisco.
“Color can complicate the subject. It can deepen our attention and resonate within our emotions and memories.”
Civic Center, etching, 5 x 4 inches, 2018
Window Lattice, etching, 5 x 4 inches, 2018
How does the printmaking process itself relate to how you work with color?
Working with multiple plate etchings, drawing choices are made separately from choosing colors. When I am using watercolor or colored pencils, I may have the perfect mark but the wrong color. In printmaking, I can take a drawn mark and try it in different colors. I do a lot of color proofing with my prints -- fine-tuning the color relationships, the transparency of the ink, and the shift in color. Using transparent color is a very important tool that printmaking gives me.
I often make my copper plates with very deeply etched aquatint areas, knowing that this will give me maximum flexibility when printing. How dark or intense that tone will be in the final print is determined by the concentration or transparency of the ink. I can control at the inking station the value and color of each ink I mix. Adjusting the colors and inks after the drawing stages of the plate is essential in my process.
Another important part of the printmaking process is that color is layered in a way unlike what I can achieve in washes of paint. Once the first layers of ink are printed, they are embedded in the paper fibers and when the next layer is printed, there is a meeting of those colors but also separateness that allows the light to bounce around in the paper and create a richness or sparkle with the ink.
“Once the first layers of ink are printed, they are embedded in the paper fibers and when the next layer is printed, there is a meeting of those colors but also separateness that allows the light to bounce around in the paper and create a richness or sparkle with the ink.”
Park Gate Turnstile, etching and watercolor, 5 x 4 inches, 2020
How does color represent or support the mind space of your work?
I think a lot about music when I think about color and when I am in-process in the studio. I think about sustained notes and very subtle total shifts and half steps. Color, like music, creates wavelengths and changes in the air that we perceive and interpret. Changing one note of a musical cord can significantly change the concepts, emotional impact, and narrative of a song.
The same is true for color. Interactions and resonance of color creates space into the page, and this space can be an unknown space, or a changing and shifting space. This idea certainly reflects how I look at the physical world around me and how I also relate to an internal world. Color can complicate the subject. It can deepen our attention and resonate within our emotions and memories. Making my work is a kind of meditation on, and questioning of, the space we perceive around us and color helps sustain those meditations and carry those sensitivities in the works.
Retaining Wall Removed, photo polymer intaglio and etching, 12 x 12 inches, 2020