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Susan Shatter's Watery World of Watercolor
A major artist in a minor medium
by Edgar Allen Beem
Susan Shatter ranks among the best contemporary American watercolor painters. Other than Andrew Wyeth, I can't think of another living artist who has done a more substantial body of work in watercolor. Shatter's new exhibition, "Over Seas" at Aucocisco Gallery in Portland, Maine, features more than two dozen paintings that bring the fresh, translucent quality of watercolor to bear on the very element, water, from which the medium springs.
The majority of the paintings in the Aucocisco show were painted during Susan Shatter's recent residency on the Mediterranean's Ligurian Sea in Italy, but Shatter, a New York resident who summers in downeast Harrington, Maine, also conjures the waters of the North Atlantic, North Sea, Irish Sea, and Caribbean. On sheets ranging from as small as 12 x 10 inches to as large as 36 ½ x 52 ½ inches, Shatter evokes the quality of light on water with a sure sense of color and a deft hand, keeping her gaze below the horizon as she concentrates on the liquid play of tides and waves over rocks, shore and kelp.
Being one of the finest watercolorists in America, however, is a somewhat dubious distinction. While such great painters of the past as Charles Burchfield, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, John Marin, and John Singer Sargent made frequent use of watercolor, there is a prevalent prejudice against the medium in contemporary art.
In 1994, New York Times art critic Vivien Raynor wrote that "Watercolor, well used, is attractive to see, and it has had its share of great practitioners...in India, Persia and England of the early 19th century. But it can hardly be counted a medium of overwhelming importance." And as recently as 2003, on the occasion of a watercolor show at the New York Studio School, Susan Shatter herself was quoted as saying, "It amazes me that watercolor with all its traditional and experimental possibilities retains a secondary status in the world of painting."
The reasons watercolor has been consigned to minor genre status, along with portraiture, maritime art, miniatures, and equine art, no doubt have something to do with the insubstantial nature of the medium itself (oleaginous oil being the stuff of "serious" paintings), but they also include elements of art and social history. When the American Watercolor Society was formed in 1866, it was progressive enough to admit women, a fact that set male chauvinists against the medium. Then too, the exaggerated emphasis that modern watercolorists tend to place on materials and techniques has further marginalized watercolor as a craft. Susan Shatter does not belong to the American Watercolor Society as far as I know (though she is President of the conservative National Academy of Design), but the clubby initials AWS after an artist's name marks him or her as something of a throwback.
Be that as it may, there is no denying the sheer natural beauty of Susan Shatter's watercolors, nor the finesse with which she picks out the abstract patterns in the whirl of the watery world. Susan Shatter, along perhaps with Janet Fish (famed for the way she is able to still the reflective qualities of glass), is the exception that proves the rule. She is a major artist in a minor key.
"Susan Shatter: Over Seas," Aucocisco Gallery, June 25 to July 26, 613 Congress St., Portland ME, 207-775-2222.
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