My World

Bonnie Gangelhoff; Photos by Dave Cox

A visit with Susan Simon at her studio in Evergreen, CO.

Your studio is 8,500 feet up in the mountains. How do your surroundings influence your work? I am constantly looking out the windows to see the interactions between the animals. There is so much wildlife here—deer, elk, hummingbirds, foxes, and magpies. They all figure into my work in some capacity.

SUSAN SIMON AT HER STUDIO IN EVERGREEN, CO

Why do you prefer mixed-media works? I think it’s the freedom and the experimentation that it allows. It’s possible to keep adding and taking away from the surfaces. I love the look of built surfaces—the depth and the richness one can get from layering colors. Also, I can work different things into paintings, like feathers and imprints of leaves. I work a lot with metallic threads, which started years ago when I looked at a book of medieval manuscripts and saw that someone had carefully sewn one of the corners back together.

What else inspires your mixed-media works besides the natural world? Cave paintings, Byzantine manuscripts and icons, and works by Giotto, who did fabulous frescoes. The colors of Giotto are like the colors of the Southwest—burnt umber, gold, rust, turquoise, and Prussian blue. And Etruscan frescoes, because I’m taken with their textural depth and narrative qualities.

What kinds of thing do you keep in your studio for inspiration? There is a shrine here that grew slowly from the day my father died in 2002. I have the last photo of him and some of my favorite objects of beauty there. I’ve just added a last sweet photo of my mother, who died in November. There also are statues on the shrine from Christian, Hindu, and Jewish traditions. Over the shrine I have a large collection of crosses from all over the world. On the shrine and around the studio I have feathers, seashells, stones, a Zuni fetish collection, some small clay figures, and spirit beads that I make.

Are there recurring themes in your work? I’ve always been interested in the tools or the vehicles one uses to connect with the divine or spiritual. Besides spirit beads, which hark back to Catholic rosary beads and prayer beads in all religions, I make ceremonial robes. The paintings I like the best of mine are small works on paper that look like they were torn from some type of holy book.