Curriculum Vitae

Born
Montreal, Quebec, 1952

Studies

• Yoshida Woodblock Print Studio, Tokyo, 1984-1985
• Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1974-1975 (Bachelor of Fine Arts)
• Ecole du Musee de Beaux Arts, Montreal, Quebec, 1974
• Ontario College of Art, Toronto, 1971-1973
• Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick, 1969-1971

Selected Solo Shows

• Solo travelling to three German Museums, 2000-2001
• Private Exhibitions, Falmouth, Mass., July 1996; Montreal, November 1996; Gibson Island, Md., April, 1999
• Kabutoya Gallery, Tokyo; Genkan Gallery, Tokyo American Club; Blue Nile Gallery, Osaka; Kanda's Gallery BOQ, Okinawa; May 1994 (color catalogue)
• Edo Gallery, Boston, November 1992
• Private Exhibitions, Toronto, October 1991; Chatham, Mass., July, 1992
• Kabutoya Gallery, New Paintings and Woodblocks, Tokyo, May, 1991
• Japanese Garden and Pavilion Foundation, Montreal, September, 1990
• Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University, New Brunswick, January-May, 1988
• Kabutoya Gallery, Tokyo, Paintings and Woodblock Prints, May, 1987
• Zwicker's Gallery, Halifax, Paintings and Woodblock Prints, November, 1983
• Gallery 78, Fredericton, November, 1983; Robertson Galleries, Ottawa, November, 1982
• "Comtemplations", Atlantic Art Gallery, Halifax, November, 1981

Selected Group Shows

• "Far and Wide" Juried Biennials, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; 1996-1997; 1998-1999; travelling, catalogues
• "Moku Hanga Travelling Exhibition; Contemporary Japanese Woodcuts", Northwest Print Council, Oregon, 1997
• Annual CWAJ Print Exhibitions, Tokyo, 1986-1998, color catalogues
• Ronin Gallery Annual Print Exhibitions, New York City, 1986-1996, color catalogues
• Group Exhibitions, Webster Galleries, Calgary, 1991-1998
• "Annual International Yoshida Studio Prints", Kabutoya Gallery, Tokyo, 1985-1999, some catalogues
• Group Exhibitions, Kanda's Gallery BOQ, Tokyo, 1985-1999
• Contemporary Woodblocks, Wenniger Gallery, Boston, February, 1992, solo, May, 1996
• "Nova Scotia Printmakers", Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, December, 1990 -March, 1991, travelling
• "La Releve: Artists of the 90s", Galerie de Vente, Musee des Beaux Arts, Montreal, June, 1990
• Group Exhibitions, Kensington Paperworks Gallery, Calgary, 1983-1990
• "Visual Facts 86", Dalhousie University Gallery, Halifax, December, 1996
• "Diverse Perspectives", Mount St. Vincent University Art Gallery, September, 1985 (catalogue)
• "Atlantic Print Exhibition", Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, May 1983- (Travelling, catalogue)
• "International Works on Paper", London Regional Art Gallery, Apri.l, 1983
• "Aspects of Printmaking", Quan Gallery, Toronto, February, 1983
• "Aikins & Blackwood Watercolours", Galerie Kanessatake, Montreal, June, 1982
• "Canadian Landscape", Robertson Galleries, Ottawa, December, 1982
• "Canadian Prints", Galerie Kanessatake, Montreal, April, 1981

Grants, Awards & Honours

• Canadian Progress Club, 1993 Women of Excellence Award for Culture; Elected Academician, Royal Canadian Academy of Art, 1990; Development Grant, Nova Scotia Department of Culture, 1980, 1987, 1988; Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, 1983; Pauline Manning Award for Excellence, 1980

Selected Publications & Broadcasts (see also catalogues in exhibitions above)

• "Suezan Aikins" by Fred Harris, Tokyo Weekender, full page, color, May 10, 1991 and May 7, 1994
• "Portrait of the Artist as a Contemplative Realist", Visual Arts News, Halifax, Fall, 1994 (feature article)
• "Natural Magic", The Kansai Journal, Spring, 1994
• "Aikins Entices Japanese", Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, June 12, 1994
• "Gazing East", The Daily News, Halifax, March 3, 1994 (color full page)
• Magazin Art Internationale, pages 55 to 54, and 65, December, 1991 (color, 4 pages)
• Japan Times, "Canada's Japanese Woodblock Printmakers", October 12, 1991 (color, full page)
• CBC Radio, Prelude Program Interview with Deborah Allen, August 23, 1990
• Camelia "Interweaving Eastern & Western Esthetics", July, 1990
• CBC TV Seconde Regard Program, "L'art de Suezan Aikins", September, 23, 1990
• "Review of Eastern and Western Traditions", p. 21, Arts Atlantic Magazine, Spring, 1989
• "Suezan Aikins Paintings", Japan Art Times, May 11, 1987
• "Japanese Art in Nova Scotia - Suezan Aikins", Arts Atlantic Magazine, Summer, 1996
• "Suezan Aikins, The Woodblocks", Japan Art Times, October, 1985
• "Japan Printmaking Quarterly", Summer, 1985 (inside back cover)
• CBC TV, "The Fine Art of Printmaking", (Aikins, Porter, Silverberg), March, 1982

Selected Corporate & Private Collections

• The Canada Council Art Bank; The Hudson Bay Collection; The Nickle Art Museum; The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; The Federal Business Decvelopment Bank; The Nova Scotia Art Bank; Mount Allison University; The Royal Bank of Canada; The Bank of America; Manufacturer's Life InsuranceCo.; The Atlantic Lotto Corp.; The Bank of Montreal; Mount Saint Vincent University; Dofasco; Innocan Inc.; Mirabaud Canada; Prince Takamadonomiya Norihito; Embassy of Canada, Tokyo; The Thomas More Institute; Tokai Bank of Canada; etc.

back to top

VANS interview

The following is a feature interview with Suezan Aikins which appeared in "Visual Arts News", Volume 16, Number 3, Fall 1994. "Visual Arts News" is published four times annually by Visual Arts Nova Scotia, a non-profit charitable organization. The interview with Suezan is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher and the interviewer, Andrew Terris. When this interview took place, Andrew was Executive Director of Visual Arts Nova Scotia.

Portrait of the Artist as Contemplative Realist: an Interview With Suezan Aikins

Andrew: I wanted to start out talking about how an artist originally from Montreal finds herself working in an 'Oriental' style using 'Oriental' techniques. Weren't you a Nova Scotia College of Art and Design graduate?

Suezan: Yes, I was there for two years. I went to Mount Allison University for two years, the Ontario College of Art for two years, and NSCAD for two. So I had all of the benefits of that wonderful training, and of growing up with art-loving parents in Montreal. My parents have a broad collection [of art], including modern Japanese prints as well as older ones. But I don't think my work is 'Oriental', although I use some Oriental techniques, particularly in the Japanese woodblocks. But it's very much a mixture of Eastern and Western aesthetics. There are many things in common, so it's hard to say where the dividing line is. The Japanese know my work is very meditative, and with the woodblocks they recognize the technique immediately. The advantage of having gone to Japan fairly late - I was in my thirties - is that I already had pretty well established a velocity and direction with my vision. I wasn't too interested in surface things, but instead was really interested in the best of Japanese contemplative realism. They draw a line between photographic realism and contemplative realism; they have very little respect for the former because it isn't about the essence of things, and there is no compaction of time. A lot of Chinese and Japanese paintings use accumulated experience to construct a vision. It's not about a literal rendition of a place or a thing.

Andrew: So the contemplative would be much more emotional and intuitive?

Suezan: That's right. And there is more room for the viewer to participate. It's not all said. There's probably hundreds of pine drawings or marsh drawings in my sketchbooks, but when I come to draw one I never draw an exact one. Usually I'm going by some kind of geometric and symbolic idea, like the spiral of growth in "Evening Marsh".

Andrew: When you work, do you go back to your sketches, or were those just exercises which you then put aside?

Suezan: Well, the exercises go on for a number of years, because the same themes have always been informing and threading through my life as an artist. So what happens is that when I have a certain idea, I go through all my images, sketches, and files, looking for all the ones with a similar feeling or structure. And I kind of "mulch" them for a period, then put them away and go to work.

Andrew: What are the fundamental themes that you keep coming back to?

Suezan: Well, beyond particular subjects, its a fascination with the way that atmospheric landscape reflects - in a very flickering, suggestive way - the incredible pulse of existence, the magic of aliveness. So that although there are trees and mists and mountains and marshes [depicted], and there are the mandala pictures or the sculptures or the poems, they're all about aspects of the same subject. Whenever things get reverberating at a certain intensity is when I get excited, but I can't really get more specific about it than that.(Laughter.)

Andrew: So it's almost more about capturing an emotional state reflected in the natural world than it is specifically about something far more abstract?

Suezan: That's where it started, but I find with middle age I'm much less involved in looking for my own emotional reflection. What always brings me back to the frustration of trying to make beautiful things is the slipping-away from my emotional self. I'm not tortured by emotional self when I'm full of inspiration. I do get very tortured about my ability to get it, and to work it through, though. I definitely have my dive-and-crash periods. The real inspiration is a moment when I'm not emotionally investing myself into existence. It's rather that I let go, and existence floods me, which I feel is what sustains me.

Andrew: In that respect you're very much out of sync with what goes on in the contemporary, or establishment, art world.

Suezan: Well, I think many people are doing unrecognized things in the art world. If you stay around long enough you find all sorts of other people doing interesting things. For instance, there may not be a curator right now who is all fired up about the idea of doing a show of contemplative realists - as something totally different from photographic realism - but there are all sorts of contemplative realists out there doing exciting things. Going to Japan was wonderful because getting deeply involved in an utterly ancient culture gives somebody from a 'Jimmy Jump-Up' culture like our own the incredible advantage of realizing that everything has derivative threads to other things. The question is whether it is transformative [or not}. So that loosens you from the whole last fifty years of verbiage that has piled up around art and separated it from the community, and it brings you directly back to why art has been significant for all of the millennia that [humanity] has been making it. Luckily my lack of official art world adulation (laughter) has been more than replaced by incredible support from people in Tokyo or Vermont or in Montreal or New York or Parrsboro or Halifax. Because I hear how my work has affected their lives, that feeds me like nothing else. I feel as if I'm doing something meaningful for people that I care about. My friends want my work, and that's a great compliment.

Andrew: Do you feel that in some ways the art establishment - the curators, the administrators, the people that control what the public sees in the art institutions - are out of touch with their communities? Are they basically speaking to a very select community, and not the larger community?

Suezan: I think that they're recognizing throughout North America that they have had a shrinking community to speak to, and they're looking for ways to change that. Whether I personally have had support or not is a question that changes every year. I've had some great support and some lack of support. Luckily, because I show work throughout Canada, the United States, and Japan, I've had incredibly rich support and faith in my work. If I had to depend just on the Maritimes I could never have developed as I have, because it turns out that I need the East and the West. I wouldn't be happy with just one, because, for me, they complement one another.

Andrew: I want to go back to talk about just how you were so strongly influenced and chose to go in the direction you did.

Suezan: I think that after 15 years of immersion in Western art education - preceded by a childhood full of formal and informal art education and experience - it was a natural balance to go the the East. But what led me particularly to Japanese aesthetics is that there is a far more profound appreciation of, and oneness with, nature there [that has been] inherited from Buddhism and that our Western attitude has not allowed us to naturally develop in a very full way. The attitude that you are a part of nature offers, for me, so much relief from the Western knots I've inherited.

Andrew: In some ways it's a far more sensual approach than in the West, especially [with regard to] the NSCAD influence which is so totally conceptual, intellectual, and abstracted from reality. What strikes me about contemporary Canadian art is how dry, academic, and detached it is.

Suezan: For all of its courageous stance, there's certainly a fear of the beautiful, a fear of honestly just wanting to make something the most beautiful thing you can, of making something that's spiritually nurturing. You never hear the work 'spiritual', and the idea of the artist-as-shaman is totally defunct [in our culture].

Andrew: Well, there is a certain kind of intellectual shamanism in the Western approach.

Suezan: I wouldn't agree. Shamanism involves an activity with your community, and I don't think the current art world is very involved with its community.

Andrew: I disagree with you. It's involved with community, but it's a very narrow community.

Suezan: It's not for all of society, that's right. But I do have to say that my best educational years were at NSCAD, because their art education teachers were the best I'd ever encountered.

Andrew: Are you listening Janet Halliwell? (Laughter.)

Suezan: Please do. (Laughter.) Because I have to say they taught me how to think, and organize, and touch the soul, and how to be unselfconscious enough to do something that was completely unfashionable. It took two years of art education to rinse out surface things that I had learned weren't necessary. There are very few people in any style of art who are true visionaries, who can set up a vibrationary effect in the viewer that is immeasurable. Most art work that is produced isn't thrilling that way, so it's a matter of appreciating quality regardless of style, and I learned that in Japan. For instance, a performance artist I met who, [in one performance] coated his naked body with white powder and strung himself onto two hooks on a gurney between two skyscrapers, also recognized what ancient, unused technique of woodblock printing I had used; he appreciates quality regardless of style. He is symbolic to me of an attitude over there that I found very liberating, because you don't have to belong to a certain club. Bouncing between the United States, Canada, and Japan has really freed me from worrying about what anybody thinks [about my work].

Andrew: There's another thing that separates your work from what is currently fashionable in contemporary art circles, and that is the technique and the craft. The individual works are not something you bang off in a matter of minutes or hours. They really develop over periods of months or years.

Suezan: I have a very low cost of living so I can afford to do what I want. I can go to the farther reaches of technical incredibleness to get an effect I want. It's not for [its own sake] I'm doing it, it's because I can't get the effect I want any other way.

Andrew: You just got back from ten weeks in Japan and China. What was the purpose of your trip?

Suezan: It was a kind of pilgrimage. This was my first trip to China and my fourth to Japan. I went to see [some] incredible places because of their landscape. The nice thing is that they're [also] great centres for artists, art schools, and museums. In Okinawa I spent part of the day at this oceanic museum and they had art and artifacts from all over the Pacific Rim. It was so incredibly fascinating to me because many of the materials were similar to the materials I'm using in my sculpture. The ways of dealing with those materials was similar. [China is] a very culturally shocked place right now. They have suffered incredibly, [and] the accretion of spiritual flattening blew my mind. There is very little will to excel. I was critical of that until one afternoon I met a man in Shanghai with a ruined hand who turned out to be the former head of calligraphy at the art school in Shanghai. He had been sent to a pig farm in 1957, and in 1959 was found by the Red Guard drawing in dust behind the barns. They took a mallet and smashed his hand. So one of the leading calligraphers in China has not been able to work since. We're very lucky to have the system [we do]; it may have some rotten fruit, but it's allowed us to take very idiosyncratic paths and survive. As a woman, right now in history, I get to do all sorts of things that I would never have been able to do before. So I feel deliriously lucky at times. the thrill of being allowed to have forged as artful a life as can be managed is very fresh to me after having been in Japan and China. I feel in a very privileged position.

Andrew: It's a question that's impossible to answer, but what did you bring back from your trip to Japan and China?

Suezan: We certainly brought back countable things: paintings and books - you know, soul-feeding artifacts. From china [I brought back] this incredible appreciation for the luxury of [being allowed] to live and work this way, a freedom to do whatever I want. I've been part os so many communities as I've moved around and travelled over the years that no one community's ways are strapped onto me. I've been released from whatever I wanted to be released from here, and I've been able to keep only the good from [the East and the West]. There are things about both cultures I cannot abide, but there are things I cannot abide without.

Andrew: I wanted to ask about one other thing. In terms of marketing your work, you basically started off marketing just within the local area, right?

Suezan: Well, not really. I'd always been selling my work at home in Montreal as well. [I've been selling in] Tokyo for ten years and I'm just starting in Osaka. All of these things have happened in a totally unplanned, organic way. The reality is that if you want to be able to live by your work, you have to spend a fair amount of time showing people your work. But the blessed thing of that is that the response fills a quadrant of your spiritual well that is utterly essential. As it turns out, my lack of big time art dealer support has been a benefit.

Andrew: So you've gone from selling in two local markets - Montreal and Halifax - to selling work in Japan, in Boston, Toronto, Vancouver, etc. Was it simply a matter of going into those communities [with] samples of your work and making contact with individuals, galleries, curators?

Suezan: I always have my work with me when I travel, and I go to all the museums and galleries. When I find a gallery that seems to be good I'll often approach them to show my work. [But] I never find it easy to show people my work. This wonderful older artist in Japan I was speaking with told me, 'the day you're not afraid is the day your work will die.' So I guess it's essential to take the risk of exposing yourself.

Andrew: We started out talking about history and we've talked about the present - what about the future? Where are you going from here?

Suezan: I'm certainly full of ideas for watercolours, woodblocks, and gold-leaf paintings. I'm working on three different manuscripts of poetry, and the sculpture has taken a whole new turn. So I feel very brim-full and just wondering how I can do it all. I just hope that I can produce into my 80's. It would just break my heart to think that I could be cut down in just ten or twenty years. I would really love to think I had forty more years because I feel as if I've only gotten going.

back to top

Exhibition Review

This review of an exhibition of Suezan Aikins' work at the Kabutoya Gallery, Tokyo appeared in the Tokyo Weekender, Vol 25, No. 9, May 6, 1994. It has been reproduced with the kind permission of the publisher and the author, Fred Harris.

Suezan Aikins

One of the pleasures of owning many pictures is that, as you change them, the walls of your home create a new environment, new colors, shapes and the revival of fond memories. Just two days prior to receiving a letter and a bunch of slides from Suezan Aikins, I had hung her beautiful print of water birds approaching a glistening pond in the rain. It was pure coincidence, but it's just this kind of awareness that makes knowing Suezan such a unique pleasure. It was almost as if I anticipated a letter from her. Suezan is one of the most sincere and sensitive artists I've ever met. Her love of Japan, its art and aesthetic principles are only matched by her dedication to the craft of picture-making. It's this combination of "How to do - what I want to do" which sets her above the thousands of slap-dash, short-cut picture-makers who indulge their egos, call themselves "artists" and sell themselves on an uninformed audience.

Suezan's upcoming exhibition at the Kabutoya Gallery on the Ginza will open May 10 and continue through May 15.

Suezan is trying new techniques and experimenting with materials which are difficult to master. These beautiful efforts are a long way from the woodblock print medium which she studied and truly mastered. There is no question that she is on to greater and more exciting things.

To quote from her letter: "...It will be a show of paintings, one series on fields of gold leaf, and a second series of watercolor paintings. The 22 and 23K gold leaf are the result of three years of experiments on techniques and developing a new aesthetic specifically turned to this luminous ground. It's been a long process, but I have a good system now (five layers of gesso on stretched 300-lb. arches; oil based size - and then liquid acrylics to paint with) the liquid acrylics are transparent types, so the gold glows through all but the darkest parts...

"The gold's reflective surface is best seen in natural light. The paintings actually seem to change character with different angles and kinds of light. Even in the darkest room, one will glow in the most arresting way! As you can imagine, one can't proceed with subjects one would normally paint. The gold needs distilled kinds of subjects, and it's been fascinating to discover what works. (Too bad the gold isn't retrieveable from the many attempts that had to be destroyed.)

"The addictive quality of the gold has only grown, for me, especially once one can make it so atmoshperic...

"The watercolour series is actually a mixture of larger studio work distilled from direct observation, and of generally smaller plain air work, exploring atmospheric phenomena, and new coloristic studies..."

Suezan has been exhibiting in Japan since 1987 when she had her first one-woman show at the Kabutoya Gallery. She has also shown in Canada and participated in group shows in the United States. Her list of awards and honors is extensive:

• Canadian Progress Club '93 Women of Excellence Award for Culture
• Elected Academician, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, 1990
• Development Grant, Nova Scotia Department of Culture, 1980, 1987, 1988
• Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, 1983
• Pauline Manning Award fro Excellence, 1980

This exhibit will set a new standard for Suezan Aikins. It is well worth attending - and, if you are smart, buying.

back to top

Suezan Aikins explains Japanese woodblock technique

Japanese Woodblock Technique

Japanese woodblock printmaking originated in ancient China to print prayers by means of a simple black and white relief carving on cherry wood planks. Along with Buddhism, the technique was introduced to Japan in the 6th century.

By the 17th century, the Japanese had radically expanded the process, multiplying the number of colors by using numerous blocks and an ingenious registration system. By the 19th century these new prints, with their exciting color and design, took Europe by storm, deeply influencing many artists including Monet, Degas, and Van Gogh, who were laying the foundations for modern art.

In the Edo era of 18th century Japan, the artist was the spark of a three part team. Once the print was designed, a team of professional carvers pasted the outline to a 'key block', which are carved by the master carver. Prints of this were pasted onto all the color blocks and apprentices cut simple areas away, leaving complex work for more experienced elders. Once all the negative areas were carved away from all the blocks required for the different shapes in the image, they were sent to the printers.

The professional printers first prepared a small number of sheets of handmade paper by carefully dampening them and leaving them under a weight overnight. The next morning, with moisture stabilized thru out, they began printing, light colors first. The first area has some ink, of pure powder pigment mixed with water, applied to it, along with a dab of rice paste to control viscosity. This is carefully brushed out evenly, sometimes with gradations. A sheet of the moistened paper is laid gently onto the surface. Choosing a "baren" ( a flat dish shaped hand tool whose lacquered backing holds a coil of one of a variety of tightly knotted bamboo fibres) the back of the sheet is firmly rubbed until the pigment is absorbed by the lightly sized paper. The type of baren and amounts of ink, rice paste and rubbing pressure may change at each step, depending on the effects required. The first sheet is removed, laid carefully aside, and the block re-inked for the second sheet. The remaining sheets are done in the same manner and the process repeated for each step, with its new color and appropriate block. Some blocks are used over 20 times, overprinting areas to build up intense harmonies of color.

This characteristic lush color of woodblocks is dependent on the special mulberry papers used. Unlike the best European papers, whose cotton or linen fibers are short and opaque, the mulberry fibers are all long and translucent. This length permits paper of amazing tensile strength, able to withstand repeated hard rubbings when damp - treatment that would destroy a European paper! The translucency of mulberry fibers, and the relative lack of sizing to seal their surfaces, allows both light and pigments to impregnate this paper deeply. Instead of bouncing off the surface (as in other media) light enters the paper and reverberates up thru, in my case, 35 to 40 layers of color, each a separate step of printing. Woodblock is thus intrinsically suited for complex atmospheric effects, unobtainable with any other media. This makes the relatively intensive time required worthwhile for me. (Most of our prints take 4 to 6 months to realize, and 4 to 5 months to print the edition.) The meditative discipline required is good for the soul.

Most contemporary artists design and carve their own work, printing it themselves or working with a master printer. I'm particularly fortunate because my printer and husband, Sam Rogers, has concentrated on our work only, so that between us we've been able to develop our techniques to realize visions that would be beyond us individually.

I find the materials seductive, pure natural pigments, handmade papers bleached in cold mountain streams, keen edges of Japanese steel, and the glowing surface of woodblocks. I depend entirely on traditional craftsmen who have been refining their skills for many generations: the knife makers, the woodblock planers, the brush makers, the baren makers, the paper makers and sizers. My knives, for instance, were specially forged for me by Shimizu Hamanoten, knife makers for over 500 years. Our paper makers, Yamaguchi Sojiro and Kinuko, are inheritors of skills passed down in their paper making families for a millennium. It's very inspiring!

The alchemy of pigment, paper and water is similar to watercolor painting, and between the two I try to celebrate fleeting moments of peace and magic in life.

Suezan Aikins

back to top