Having Weathered a Technique, Artist Finds a Subject

“You know how you feel after Thanksgiving, when you can’t take one more bite of anything?” painter Suzanne Hanson asked.

That’s how she felt after 10 years of making “sun prints” of flat scrap metal arranged on big sheets of coarse-textured paper laid out on her driveway.

The 46-year-old artist, born in South Dakota and now living in San Mateo, was talking about her work in the Art Forum series at Rancho Santiago College on Monday.

Intrigued by the natural process of weathering and frustrated by the feeling that its results were “much more interesting than anything I could paint,” Hanson spent the late ‘70s and early ‘80s perfecting a technique that began as an accident when some paper was left out in the rain. She started leaving her pieces outdoors for months at a time (“I’d take a hose to them in the summertime when it didn’t rain”). Sometimes she added light-sensitive dyes to the rusting objects. The family pets were even allowed to pad over the pieces.

“I think I liked the idea of losing control (over the work) and then going to the studio and regaining it,” she said. In the studio, she cut and pasted the yellowed, object-imprinted paper and added muted hues with Prismacolor pencils.

Begun as an outgrowth of photographs she took of weathered objects near her San Mateo home, the paper pieces brought Hanson a measure of recognition when the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art awarded her the SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) prize for 1980.

A few years earlier, she had been engaged with environmental issues (in one collage, she implicitly drew parallels between the picture-perfect landscapes printed on her checks and the polluting industries to which she sent them). But her new goal was simply to make “what I think is beautiful.”

Hanson became a one-woman cottage industry, buying scrap metal by the pound and accepting her Silicon Valley neighbors’ donations of computer circuitry and other oddments. Her work was selling--generally unframed, to be hung with Velcro strips “like tapestries”--and she would visit collectors’ homes to make repairs, armed with a supply of rice paper (for the backings) and glue.

But the fragility of paper got to be a bore. A couple of years ago, she switched to unstretched canvas, which at first was “like working on a bedspread.” But she eventually figured out how to give the fabric enough body to stand up to her weathering process and learned to plot out the finished pieces on Xeroxed models. (“I’m accused by my teen-agers of overcontrolling everything, including them,” she joked.)

And then she was accepted as an artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome. Those few months were paradise--in part because “for the first time in 20 years, I was away by myself without meals to cook and kids to care for”--but also because she was smitten with “the walls and shapes and colors and shadows of Italy.” Hanson was even enraptured by the blue scaffolding (“with brass joints!”) on buildings being remodeled.

She brought a bunch of the weathered sheets of paper with her (“I had done them all ahead”), worried that she wouldn’t be allowing herself to be influenced by “the textures of Rome.” But those textures--as well as patterns of light through archways and a richer palette of colors--found their way into subsequent work.

A return trip to Rome earlier this year yielded a further dividend. Her new stained and weathered canvases contain recognizable imagery--ranging from precise architectural renderings of Roman archways to the red-and-white plastic tape keeping trespassers outside construction areas. One detail is a rendering of a stone carving on an Etruscan tomb sculpture that Hanson saw in a museum.

Her carefully honed technique, once primarily a way of making attractive patterns, had finally found its subject in a specific urban landscape. Most recently, Hanson has been looking at elements of the California environment (“I like a lot of the new construction materials and the new architecture.”).

As a painter who overcame a stubborn dislike of paint and canvas--as well as a curious personal taboo about using color in her work--Hanson said she has been “accused of being a sculptor and not knowing it. . . . I have a real sad day when I have to sweep up my (scrap metal) shapes because they’re disintegrating.”