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Pausing to See Anew
For Susan Tessem, long-time professor of art and chair of the art department at Washington College, a year's sabbatical devoted to painting has provided a window on her future.
There will be life, she says, after teaching.
I had always been a better teacher than a painter,"  says Tessem, who declares she can teach anyone to draw. "A few years ago I became a better painter than a teacher and at this point in my life I'm relishing this gift of time to explore new directions. It's like I'm back in graduate school. This sabbatical has been unbelievably liberating, and I'm really excited about these paintings."
She is clearly thriving in the creative mode. In the second-story studio of her Water Street home, Tessem is surrounded by canvasses of varying sizes, all  in various stages of completion, as she prepares for her opening show at the Carla Massoni Gallery in Chestertown. There is something familiar about them. The tiered landscapes, triptychs framed by clean, narrow white lines, the architectural elements, the potted geraniums, all are reminiscent of her earlier works. But these are warmer, richer, more intriguing. The paintings beckon the viewer to step over low stone fences into lush meadows, to feel the texture of ancient stucco walls and layers of paint on wooden shutters, to see the reflections of light and shadow in the windows, to peer inside the French blue door.
"What I try to do is to make places interesting to visit," Tessem says. "There are enough tangible, realistic elements to make people comfortable, and enough quirks in the way I put images together to make the  scenes a bit provocative. Viewers have to perform what I call 'visual gymnastics' to determine where they are in that space."
With the sensibility of a designer or builder, Tessem imposes an order on her paintings. She offers a combination of perspectives that recall the technique of Renaissance painters. Architectural elements serve as focal points in the natural world. Windows and doors reflect or look through the landscape that softens into shadows.
This collection of eighteen paintings and twelve pastel drawings, progeny of her travels through southern France and Italy last fall, represents a shift in Tessem's artistic approach. To capture the European landscapes, she chose a completely different palette from the green and pink pastels of her imagined Eastern Shore scenes. And instead of summoning from her subconscious the images and vistas she wanted to capture on canvas, Tessem has grounded this collection in reality, working from photographs of places she visited and architectural details that caught her attention.
The guest of Professor  Bob Day and his wife, Kathy, at their farm near Saint Michel-de-Montaigne, Tessem steeped herself in the surrounding French countryside. Some images also capture the landscapes Tessem saw during her drive with the Days through the Piedmont to Venice. They made the trip over the mountains in a 1983 white Citroen named Blanche.
Back home in Chestertown last fall, she set to work. With a discipline born of economic necessity during her graduate school days, Tessem carefully planned her approach to each blank canvas. "When I was a student I couldn't afford to throw away canvas, so I had to plan what I was going to do," she says. With an idea in mind, she plotted her design on paper.
"For the first time, I used photographs as a starting point for my designs," Tessem says, "but the paintings  always take on their own character. They are never copies of my original design. They grow organically. The gradual addition of color space, and visual texture creates depth in the painting. That's why I like to work on several paintings at the same time. It gives them a gestation period. After a week or so, I decide whether I can live with a decision I've made."
While viewers certainly will recognize the influence of her travels in her new body of work, Carla Massoni says the transformation is deeper than a change of scenery.
"This isn't  about Italy and it isn't about France," she says of Tessem's new work. "It's about Sue. It's about someone who has paused at the midpoint of her career and has taken the time to see differently. Sue stopped, she turned her head, and she is seeing. All the technique is there. She's taken a wonderful opportunity to see the familiar in a different way, and the results are stunning. There's a sense of play and fun and delight in these paintings; there's a new energy that's really quite something."
As thrilled as she was to have the luxury of time, and as happy as she is with the results of her sabbatical work, Tessem is just as determined to continue the process of creating. That's what she does, even while she juggles the demands of teaching. During the regular academic year, Tessem spends two hours in her studio every morning before heading to the Larrabee Arts Center.
"It does not matter what I make--paintings, pottery, or sawdust in my woodworking shop--I love to make things. And I like to design. My paintings are all practice. I'm just practicing to make a really good painting."
For Tessem, her teaching career at Washington College has been as much of a creative learning process as her painting career has been. Tessem was "just a youngster" in 1973 when she first came to the basement of Gibson Fine Arts, then McAlpin Studio, to teach design and beginning drawing. As the sole studio arts instructor, she had to learn how to throw pots, how to teach pastels, how to make prints. "I was strictly a painter, and I had to learn to do it all," she says.
The satisfaction comes not in teaching someone how to be an artist (that's an impossible feat, she says) but in teaching craft.
"I can teach  anyone to draw," she asserts. "I approach it like a foreign language, or as a problem to solve: how to translate three dimensions into a two-dimensional plane. There are devices to use to measure proportion. But that has nothing to do with making art. People who teach literature and history and philosophy have as much to do with helping students to be artists as I do. One course in drawing doesn't make you an artist, but if you read books and go to museums and plays and concerts, you just might be an artist. I so strongly believe in the liberal arts because it's about ideas."
What she does in the Larrabee Arts Center, she says, is what every Washington College professor does so well. "I take students and make them better than they thought they could be."
Much like her paintings. She would be the first to admit that she has been painting the same painting all her life. That her paintings reflect not only the landscape she imagines, but also reflect who she is. They just keep getting better.
"Although the new work bears the traditional Tessem stamp of structured format, they are less so," comments Massoni, the gallery owner who has shown Tessem's work for the past decade. "There is an openness. The light is new, the colors more saturated as they seep over the canvas. All the familiar elements are there. The wish to contain the split-second of a moment, to record the space between the breaths, to examine the juxtaposition of life and death conveyed with her barren trees and lush meadows.
"But there is something different in Tessem's new places--something softer, a sense of delight, wonder, enjoyment and fullness. The conscious choice to view her world differently, the desire to create change, and the luxury of time have produced an intriguing body of new work."
Marcia Landskroener is the College's senior writer and managing editor of the Washington College Magazine.
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