Staring at the precipice of a canvas-backed abyss, hunched over an easel for hours until time starts to stretch toward that Scary Door, the marks march away from the figure like little ants out of sync and entirely out of line. In the world of portraiture, diving head-first into pragmatic organization and expressing everything that needs to be said in paint, sometimes it’s necessary to revisit the beginning.
Suzanne Stebila is sitting at the granite countertop in her kitchen, waving her arms in vivid description of her working process. “Exactly,” she exclaims with an outstretched finger. She is working on the mock-up for the piece she will live paint at the Viola Nominee Showcase at the Orpheum Theater on Thu, Feb. 4. As a contender in the Emerging Artist category at the annual Viola Awards, she will create on canvas right in front of the audience alongside fellow nominee and painter, Erin Brinkman.
“You have to get down to exactly what you want to say—even if it’s one little red mark,” Stebila says, sending a brush tip scurrying across the painting splayed on the counter. The artist is famous for adding little hash marks of serendipitous chaos to a newly finished piece. And in a flourish of excitement, it just so happens, with one stroke, she swipes a knee for the upside down aerialist in her image. “Then see, look at that—it’s perfect!”
This oil painter is one member of the local artistic coterie qualified to underscore that designation. After all, she has painted enough faces to account for a dent in the world’s population: all her children’s boyfriends and girlfriends, all the friends they ever knew and friends of those friends. The large-scale visages of many former models peek back at her from the walls of the tidy home she shares with her husband and fellow artist, John Stebila, brimming with carefully-curated artwork.
“If you want to do figure painting you have to paint it over and over and over again so they don’t look flat and they don’t look big-headed. Like a nose, where’s the nose? Up here, coming right out of the eyes,” she imagines.
It is this approach that sets her work apart: coming from the point of view of graphic design rather than traditional portraiture, she explains. But each distills the essence of the human before her. Some are so familiar one could swear they’ve seen those very same big green eyes and bright red hair somewhere. And many figures in these frames share at least one quality as some never saw their reflections in the way Stebila envisioned the same. She sees only beauty.
She asserts, “You have to make mistakes. Mistakes are the best part of the painting. It’s like my friend always said, ‘If you can’t hide it—feature it.’ I go for whatever the oddities and the mistakes are. I just don’t try to hide it.”
Mistakes are a given, but preparedness is the converse of the same coin. Born in Connecticut, Stebila relocated to the then-upstart Lake Havasu City, with her family where she met her future husband and flourished in the burgeoning business scene. Now retired, the couple can afford the luxury of time to explore their art. For John, he can scour forgotten items to repurpose into imaginative assemblage. And Suzanne, she journeys past the foundations of her portrait-based style.
Her latest series, Companions, that will take shape in her Aspen Loft studio, 12.12., on February 12, is an experiment in exploration of form and focus, collaboration and artful representation of an all-too-often taboo subject.
Ideas bouncing from her brain, through her hands, and onto her sprawling notebook pages, Companions started to take shape last January. The two-part installation assembles comparative canvas-backed and photographic portraiture in the nude. With Havasu-based photographer, Mitch Tarr, behind the lens and Stebila at the canvas—whether cloth or copper—Companions presents dual visions of the same image that, Stebila explains, reflect the landscape of the female form for all its valleys, dips and crevices.
“The satin is implied in the copper,” Stebila notes of her image, Torso, clad in blue atop a large plate of patina-speckled circuit board. “I wanted to go with a cool feeling because the copper is so warm. I want to have that contrast of the cool skin and the warm copper. Most of the pictures Mitch has done are going to be paired in this way. We’ve brought it down to the bare essentials of what we want to show: lights and darks, shadows, the outlines and landscape of the body.”
She circles back to maintaining a raw image of what laid before her and Tarr that day in her living room as the professional nude photographer posed their model across black bubble wrap and crimson satin. Working with a minimally-retouched photograph Tarr spared from Photoshopped brushes, the two worked together to pare the image down to suit their needs and accentuate the body in all its humanness.
“Both have their positive aspects because you look at a photograph and it’s so beautiful,” she says of this joint work. “All the information is there. When you look at a painting you fill in the blanks because I can’t make every mark.”
Representing one of the most important genres in all of art history, Companions stands testament to the opportunities for full nude shows in a local setting—something the artist hopes to see more of in Flagstaff galleries. One chance will reveal itself this First Friday ArtWalk with the Savoir exhibition at the State Bar where Stebila will present her additions to the all-nude, multi-artist show. (Read more on page 14 of this issue).
“Every once in a while there’s a little political undertone. We can be separate from whatever they think is not appropriate for certain people, and it doesn’t have to be Maplethorpe. It doesn’t have to go to that extreme. But I would love to see a full frontal crotch painting if it’s tastefully done and done well,” she explains with a laugh. “Let’s push the envelope a little bit.”
With projects piling up amid a ceaseless compulsion to paint the off-centered elements in this artist’s world, Stebila contemplates what brought her to the point of gaining ground at the Violas and in the scene. When she arrived in Flagstaff three years ago, she joined the Artists’ Coalition of Flagstaff and sold three paintings in one day—a far cry from her modest beginnings at a single Havasu gallery. For her, she narrows this progress to the Flagstaff Arts Council’s initiative, ArtBox Institute, which she completed last May.
“It was so much fun. It was like everything clicked in my head,” she says of her time incubating in the business training course for artists. “It’s almost like I got out of my way and said, ‘I gotta get this done!’ I’m gonna paint and this is what I’m gonna paint!’ I just grew up that day—I don’t know what it was. Everything changed.”
Joining ArtBox, Stebila explains, was not only a way to meet other artists and establish deadlines, but the group’s required exhibition, Flow, had them all wondering how to fill that vacuous space. Luckily, she is one artist fearless when it comes to size. Using images that would later become Companions, she painted two large nudes to decorate the Flagstaff Modern and Contemporary gallery. This uninhibited study of her craft pits Stebila on an even keel, one she straightened within her studio, practicing and practicing.
“Then I started developing,” she explains of all these adventures in oils. “And you really don’t develop as an artist, I don’t think, until you can really put all your heart and soul into it.”
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