In artist Susan Hall’s tall, airy studio in Point Reyes Station, paintings of West Marin cover every wall. Outside her windows you can see fruit trees, golden grass and the house that she was raised in.
“My sense of self has really been influenced by growing up here,” Hall said during an interview at her home on Monday. “I am the environment and the landscape; there’s no question of that in my mind.”
Hall, a trim woman who wore her hair tucked in a neatly tied scarf, spent 22 years as part of the New York City art scene before returning to spend another 15 years refining her craft in West Marin. A show of her work opens at College of Marin on Thursday. She will also read from her creative memoir about her life as an artist, River Flowing Home, which is due to be published in January.
“One of the reasons I wrote the book was to show people what I went through, and maybe inspire them to follow their deepest urges,” Hall said.
Even as a child, Hall knew she wanted to be an artist. She wrote poetry and played the piano, but was most drawn to painting.
Through sixth grade she attended the two-room Black School—where the fire station stands today—moving on to be in the first class at the West Marin School. After graduating from Tomales High she studied at College of Marin and later at the School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland before moving on to get a masters degree in painting from UC Berkeley in 1967.
There, studying under teachers such as Mark Rothko and David Hockney, she said that her life really changed. “Rothko would go to each student’s studio and spend a day there, looking at their work,” she said.
“Back then there was no…separation,” she added, waving a hand for emphasis. “The art world was really very small; I could make a connection that was very personal.”
After graduation, Hall worked alongside other bohemians, hippies and artists at the Post Office in San Francisco and also taught drawing, painting and design to undergraduates at Berkeley.
When she was 26 years old, she decided to move to New York City and paint. She traded her loft in an old warehouse that looked over the bay in North Beach for a musician’s apartment on Bowery and Grand in Manhattan.
Hall and her boyfriend took a taxi from the airport to their new home on an early morning in January of 1970. Homeless people were warming their hands over fires on street corners; the city seemed to be a raw, intimidating place and Hall wondered what she had gotten herself into.
“It was hard – it was the Bowery – it was the real thing,” she recollected. “At the same time, there was a very tight knit community of artists and writers and so on.”
Her first show opened a year and a half later at the Whitney Museum. It was an auspicious beginning that she credits to the welcoming art community, where she continued to thrive for the next two decades.
Hall’s work gradually evolved from the intricate paintings of women and their lives that first showed at the Whitney. First it began to include landscapes, which were often urban and surreal. In one, an orchid floats on an envelope above a city skyline; in another, a bathroom mirror inexplicably reflects a black and starry night sky.
Gradually, simplicity and natural scenes became more prominent in the paintings that she showed. Shortly before she moved back to West Marin, boats and silhouettes dominated her exhibitions.
By that time, she felt that the New York art community had become commercialized, and was ready to move. “Things had changed a lot,” she said. “I was longing for the poet’s life, and had done all that I could in New York.” Her paintings from that time were dark and graceful, with lots of water—closer to her current, spare style.
After the move, people and buildings disappeared from her work almost entirely, while hills, rivers and trees became prevalent.
On the surface, her early canvases looked almost nothing liker her current ones, but Hall said that the way she sees things has never changed. Even though her subjects and style were different, she said her compositions had an openness that wasn’t found in that of her colleagues.
“My friends who grew up in big cities have a very different way of taking things in,” she said. “For me every object has a lot of space around it. The atmosphere builds the objects, almost.”
Today, Hall’s work is viscerally evocative of West Marin. Bold blackbird silhouettes congregate on a telephone wire, against a background of reds and oranges that form the starkest suggestion of a landscape in one painting. On another, hills and trees are rendered in a wash of gray and green so fine the texture of the canvas shows through.
Others pieces are less abstract; cypress trees arch over a pathway illuminated by sunlight; white deer browse under a looming cloud; a grand and slightly canted barn dwarfs a landscape with a single tree on the horizon.
“I’m not a plein air painter, partly because I take out a lot and I put in a lot,” Hall said. “Personally, I feel the deeper part of the landscape requires editing to get at the core of it.”
Susan Hall’s work can be seen at her solo show, River Flowing Home, at the College of Marin from September 22 to October 24. The opening reception will take place on Thursday, September 25 from 6 to 8 p.m. and will feature a reading from her forthcoming book.
