Artist's Statement
I grew up surrounded by both eastern and western
art and culture in a French/English family in Montreal. I've always spent all
the time I could outdoors, and having now passed the 1/2-century mark, I see
that's where the sacred force has always been, for me. My family collected
the old ukyoe woodblocks and later the new modern prints, and I loved the unique
glowing papers and colors. I was fascinated by the East's long tradition of
contemplative realism, where the transmission of distilled observations aims to
evoke the spirit in space, compared to the West's traditional vision of realism
as a photographic skin.
After seven years of art studies in Canada's top
art schools, and several years teaching, I decided to work fulltime as an artist,
and try to express the sense of numinous sacredness in nature. I wanted to use
all I had learned of abstraction's explorations of color and space in landscapes
where light and shade echo and evoke spiritual states.
I soon began to concentrate on the increasingly
complex art of Japanese technique woodblock as I thought it could best express
the purity of natural light. Unlike other printing media, the traditional Japanese
form of woodblock can use multiple transparent layers of pure water/powder pigments
because the mulberry paper fibers are much longer and translucent, making them
much stronger and able to withstand the arduous printing that would destroy a
western paper made of short opaque cotton or linen. The exquisite Japanese
paper's translucence allows a unique glowing of discrete layers of color within
the fibers, a luscious effect that Western papers can't offer.
I started small, with few blocks and few layers
of color, but after trying to reinvent the wheel alone, in '84 and '85 my husband,
Sam Rogers, and I went to study with Yoshida, Toshi in Tokyo, where we were taught
the full repertoire of both traditional and modern techniques. There we decided
I would design, carve, make colors and figure out printing directions, and Sam
would develop his printing skills and muscles. Freed from the backbreaking labor
of printing, I started making much bigger and more complicated woodblocks, with
visions of using the old techniques to make color freed from bounding lines and
creating a sense of atmospheric depth. Since the, we have ended up taking about
a year for each new woodblock, and using up to 40 layers of color from 10 or
12 carved blocks. I count myself very lucky to have been able to develop our
unique atmospheric technique thanks to Sam's invaluable printing talent and
devotion.
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Moonfishing, Suezan Aikins, 1988
Photograph by Mike Mosall
Sound of Wings, Suezan Aikins, 1993
Photograph by Mike Mosall
For more information about Suezan Aikins,
please visit:
www.suezan-aikins.com
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