Suzanne Moore
C510 Conjuring Content and Meaning: Exploring Letterforms and Developing Words as Imagery
The rich history and contemporary focus on creating beautiful letterforms has given lettering artists a wealth of visual information and trained our hands to a high skill level. Now what? How can we use those informed hand skills and use this distinct vision to create work with soul and meaning? Each of us has life experience that informs our passions and can lead us to distinct and meaningful work. This class will focus on letters and words as the “subject” of painting, drawing and off-press printmaking techniques will allow each student to pursue a path of inquiry and image-making in wet and dry media on paper. Class work will spring from a text of each artist’s choosing, resulting in a series of (2-D) panels or a (non-sewn) book. Legibility and abstraction, scale and palette, form and content will be considered as the process unfolds. Layering, resists, tool and color exploration will allow unique work to evolve naturally.
Enrolled students will receive an introductory letter including a pre-class assignment and additional details about the class.
Supply List
- 2H or 3H pencil
- Plastic eraser
- 18" C-Thru ruler
- Triangle (10")
- Bone (or Teflon) folder
- 2 Fineline applicators
- Fine mist spray bottle
- Water tubs: 2 large (a quart or larger) and 2 small
- Pipette (plastic is fine)
- Dr Martin’s palette
- A few plastic handle mixing brushes (made for kids, with various colored handles)
- A few nylon brushes for painting with acrylics (various sizes, pointed and flat)
- A few of your favorite nibs, holders and writing tools
- Mark-making tools of various sizes: a tool you have made, preferably out of something you would throw away, your largest tool, your finest tool
- Something crazy you’d like to try: rope, palm frond, some recycled object and a container large enough to hold ink to dip it in
- “Hog hair” brush from the hardware store (inexpensive) or other paint brush 2 1/2"
- A few tubes of gouache: jet black, and primaries (if you have them)
- Old washcloth (for earth-friendly clean-up)
Optional: ONLY if you have them and want to use/try them (I’ll bring a good selection, for use in class)
- Graphite sticks, Graphtint pencils or sticks
- Conte sticks
- Colored pencils (Prismacolor if you have them)
- Prismacolor colorless pencil: PC-1077)
- Color media you already have and use well: WC, pan colors, WC pencils, Aquarelle sticks, etc
- Squeeze bottle(s) with small tip (to use with acrylics)
Materials Fee
Born to a family of gifted inventor-engineers, raised in post-Sputnik middle America, with aptitudes in math and science, SUZANNE was channelled into those fields at an early age, making her way into the world of art-making at 20-something. She earned a BFA in printmaking and drawing in 1973, at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Suzanne is a lettering artist, painter, and printmaker whose eclectic interests meld in the diversity of her artists’ books. She weaves word and painted image with form, content, and structure into spaces which invite the reader to engage, examine and inquire. Her books blend abstract and representational imagery, rich color and surface treatments with textual content and contemporary lettering to create work that obscures the line between word and image, legibility and abstraction. Suzanne’s work is exhibited widely, and her books have been acquired for private and public collections in the U.S. and Europe. Among them are the Pierpont Morgan Library, The Library of Congress and the rare book collections of Harvard University, Yale, Princeton, Bowdoin College, and the Boston Athenaeum.