Susanne Leutenegger

" ..... but that's not the beginning"
Artist profile of Susanne Leutenegger by Lynda Cookson
Published in June 2006




Space is very important to Susanne Leutenegger, a full time member of the Backwater Artists' Group in Cork, Ireland. In taking space away she creates more. We picked our way across her varnished wooden studio floor, gingerly stepping in the small spaces left between paintings and pots of paint ruling supreme where feet usually dominate. No chairs. No stools. Suzanne sits or kneels on the floor to work. She kindly sourced a stool from somewhere for me and I perched there, an obvious intruder disrupting the flow of paintings as they spread from the floor up all the walls, with abstract cardboard sculptures and cut-outs filling the sunny space on the window ledges. And yet by filling this space with her work Susanne, in her own words, is creating yet more space: "Painting for me is giving space. Giving space to what is yet silent, what is waiting patiently, what is undiscovered. I usually start with a blurred, unknowing surface and a searching line, letting them explore a movement together. I like the idea that they carry an essence of being."

"Lightning" by Susanne Leutenegger

Early days
She was born in Sankt Gallen in Switzerland in 1957 but only began her art studies when she came to live in Ireland in 1983. Four years later she graduated with a distinction in Fine Art from the College of Art and Design in Cork but was disappointed at the lack of visual art facilities in the area. In those days there was only one gallery in Cork - the Lavitte Gallery, and most of the art graduates left Ireland to chase their dreams on more fertile ground in Europe or the States. Not long after her graduation, her German husband's work took them back to Oldenburg in North Germany, where they stayed for the next seven years.

"Trumpet Flower" by Susanne Leutenegger

Boom times in Germany
Susanne remembered that: "Those were boom times in Germany. Everyone wanted to buy art, so I could make a modest living. What struck me most was how many people knew about art and were open to abstract art. In Ireland people were scared of abstract art. However, we missed Ireland. It is special here and in 1994 my husband found a permanent job here in Cork, so we returned. It was great to reconnect with other artists and friends."

When she first arrived in Germany she was gripped by a fear that she was never going to paint again and her paintings shrank in size, becoming tight and overly constructed with her nervous movements. She felt under pressure to prove herself. Finally she met other artists and they founded a collective in an old factory. Their ideas were big, their meetings constant and their theory bursting to become reality. Installation art was not huge in the late 1980s but that was largely what came out of this energy and the freedom they gave themselves.

Susanne returned to a changing Ireland. The Celtic Tiger had arrived. No longer were she and her husband the exotic foreigners they had been in the early 1980s. They settled in Crosshaven, enjoying being part of a small community and Susanne started painting again. But this time there was a special quality - she had become a mother and her work was softened and influenced by her need to nurture another type of creation. She says: "It brought another human dimension into my art."

"Schnapp" by Susanne Leutenegger

Mixing paints and chalks
Colour, and not just the choice of colour but the quality of colour, is paramount for Susanne. She finds commercial acrylics too shiny so she mixes her own paints using concentrated pigments, oxides, marble dust, and quartz dust, bound with an acrylic medium and used straight from the little glass jars she mixed them in. Also part of her tool kit are oil bars, oil of cloves as a preservative, and chalks - which she makes herself as well. Susanne looked up from where she was crouching amongst her precious pots, brandishing a fat piece of chalk. "Commercial chalk colours are limited so I mix refined Plaster of Paris with pigments like oxide and then mould them. To use them I dip them into a solution of water and acrylic medium so that when it is dry is it fixed."

 "Horizontal Underground Stem" by Susanne Leutenegger

Shape, line and words
She starts with a line on paper but that's not the beginning. Alone in her studio Susanne moulds three-dimensional shapes with clay, letting her thoughts slip away and allowing her mind to draw on its subconscious. She moves on to producing loads and loads of small sketches, not wanting them to be art pieces on their own but rather to be fragments to inspire a part of the final creation. She doesn't expect to feel much about them on that day but opens the studio door the next morning with a sense of anticipation at what she might feel when she looks at them with fresh eyes. Her eyes widen at the thought of being able to say: "Wow" I can use this!"

The title of an art piece becomes part of the whole creation. She reads a lot and takes notes of quirky words, titles, and snippets that will give her the feeling for a made up word in the tradition of the Dada people, or for a title to give a painting that final burst of life. There's a sense that her work is complete within the triangle of shape, line and words. In her own expression of what she does, her energy is tangible as she begins, then becomes balanced as the creation blossoms into being and runs out, her words becoming one as the energy is spent:

Trustful I enter into a dialogue with new existences.
Hands become leaves,
leaves become feathers,
feathers become feet,
feet become flower buds,
buds become paddles,
paddles become bells,
a bell a wing,
a wing a rattling gourd,
a gourd pearl,
pearl stonefruitkernel.

 "Misia" by Susanne Leutenegger

What does Susanne want people to feel about her art? "I've never thought about that! I paint for myself. And I don't want to analyse my work too much - I don't want to lose the intuitive side."

In June 2005 she co-founded the artists' co-operative gallery Arthaven in Crosshaven. It's a large bright space on the waterfront in the centre of the town, where the work of the co-operative members as well as other artists is exhibited and sold.

Susanne's work is permanently represented by Galerie Kunstueck in Oldenburg, Germany; Galerie Flora in Wil, Switzerland; Galerie Artforum in Hanover, Germany; and the O'Sullivan Bewick Gallery in Enniskerry. Her paintings are part of public and private collections in Germany, Switzerland and Ireland (University College Cork and Quest).

"Velvet Blossom" by Susanne Leutenegger

www.SusanneLeutenegger.com

Later, I received this lovely note from Susanne:

Dear Lynda, how exciting to get suddenly an article written about me in the
post ! I was a bit nervous about reading it first, and after the first
paragraph settled and enjoyed the words that you found and the short but
precise style. What amazes me most was that you remembered the details and
the whole story together so well after half a year and that you really seem
to have listened and heard what I was about ! Wow ! Thank you very much !
Obviously you are an artist yourself and you know what process in mind and
on canvas you are talking about.
Many thanks Susanne
Tue, 2 May 2006