Finding the Light Through the Darkness: A Visit with Artist Susan Parsons

She welcomed me through the door of her “little incubator”... a sun-warmed studio in her backyard, tucked away up some old wooden steps, surrounded by ancient trees with big holes in them - where I was already imagining owls lived. Old wood floors, old wood walls, an iron orb-like chandelier casting shadows across everything.

The studio had a sliding glass door that looked out at the old tree. As my eyes surveyed the room, there were all sorts of treasures. Oil paintings and charcoal drawings and ceramics.

The first thing that caught my attention were three or four enormous floor-to-ceiling charcoal drawings covering the right hand wall. Unmistakable. They reminded me of automatic writing... the surrealist practice of letting the unconscious take the hand and move it across the page without the rational mind intervening. You could tell immediately that she was working something out... something coming from deep within her subconscious, or even other worldly. I was able to see all sorts of things in them like a huge Rorschach test. Nothing was explicitly drawn out, it had depth, was layered and it looked like connective tissue or fascia.

On the back wall of the well loved studio hung a horse skull, (a real one with teeth) and beside it on an easel, her charcoal rendering of it... life-size, exact, breathtaking. It was like she took something dead… (really really dead) and brought it back to life, how cool!

I don't go into these conversations with a list of questions. I prefer a clean slate... a clean canvas, so to speak... and to let things unfold naturally. With Susan, that instinct paid off.

Susan and I met in dance class, and maybe that's why our conversation flowed so easily. We leapt from one subject to the next the way dancers move across a floor... from charcoal to crows, consciousness to the moon and then back to earth. We jumped all over the place but never lost track of one another at our center.

There was a union of minds, we “got” each other. And some of the most meaningful things that passed between us were the things neither of us said out loud... the pauses, the knowing looks, the moments where one of us would start a sentence and the other would already be nodding. That kind of communication is a gift, when two people are tuned in.

Susan’s early days

Susan taught herself to draw at an early age, and she led me to a wall that had her earliert work pinned to the wall, one was a really good pencil drawing of dogs. When Susan mentioned how young she was, it was even more amazing that she just had this great combination of curiosity and natural talent. Growing up without much money, pencils and whatever paper she could find became her medium of necessity. She told me drawing was her way in when words weren't enough. "I can't quite express myself with words too easily... whereas with art, I could just kind of let loose." And the urge was always there, she said. "I have this intense need to do it. I didn't even know why back way back when." What she didn't know then... what took decades to understand... was why she needed to draw at all.

"I have this intense relationship with nature," she told me, gesturing toward the window. "I feel so separate sometimes. I think that's why I started drawing... like I want to get to know that thing." I took it to mean she wanted a deeper understanding of it and a relationship with it, immerse herself into nature and be a part of it, not separate from it. "We could really learn from nature. We should."

Susan went to the Rhode Island School of Design, which she describes as the best four years of her life outside of raising her three sons. It was a place where the boundaries weren't just pushed... they were assumed to be negotiable. She felt at home for the first time, among people who weren't afraid.

But art school wasn't a straight line to a studio practice. (it rarely is) and intervened, as it tends to. There were years of raising children, a divorce, a move across the country, jobs in graphic design and coding. Yes, coding... Susan is also a self-taught programmer, one of only two women who didn't drop out of a front-end development course at NYU night school, who taught herself calculus in high school, and who once walked into a room full of boys who asked her what she was doing there. She kept going anyway.

She worked for the ceramicist Jonathan Adler twice, a decade apart, (I looked him up and he’s kind of a big deal!) learning the craft from the inside of a working studio. She joined a Berkeley pottery collective when she moved to California. She kept drawing in sketchbooks when she had nothing else... little records of ideas and feelings, she said as she flipped through its small pages giving me glimpses of some seedling ideas.

Pinned to the wall were color studies, she made wheels with different color schemes, sketches, ways of keeping her hand in it when time was scarce. She talked about color the way she talks about everything... as a problem to be solved, a mystery to be understood. "It's like this neverending challenge of problem solving which I love," she said. "It's hard. It's not always happy." And when something is finished? "I'm like just stop. It's done and let it be move on." I find that interesting because many painters I have interviewed have the exact opposite experience where they don’t know when enough is enough.

"If you're longing for it," she told me, "you're going to find a way." and I guess that could apply to anything.

What strikes me about Susan's story is not just that she persisted, but how she persisted... sideways, around corners, through unexpected doors. The assistant job she got with Jonathan Adler when she couldn't afford a master's degree. The night school course she almost quit. The pottery studio she finally joined in California, with time and space to just play.

CRITTERS AND CREATURES

One main theme in many of her paintings are crows, so I asked her about them.

She told me a cute story that two of them used to come and sit on the deck railing outside her studio window while she practiced belly dancing on Saturday mornings, red veil moving through the air. They would just arrive and perch there, watching her dance as if they had front row tickets to the event.

Later, thinking about how often crows appear in her work and apparently her life, I looked up the symbolism surrounding them. The crow is associated with mystery, transformation, intuition, the unseen. It’s said to carry the energy of the void... that place of pure potential from which everything emerges. The unknowable. The threshold between worlds. It all felt strangely aligned with Susan and the way she moves through life and art.

But Susan’s relationship with crows isn’t abstract or purely decorative. She’s actually studies them. We talked about how they have the abiliy to recognize individual human faces and how they can warn one another about specific people they perceive as threats. She knows researchers believe they may even have individual names for each other. She knows they mate for life.

She studies crows the same way she studies color, texture, coding, patterns. Something catches her attention and she follows it. “There’s something going on there,” she told me, “and I want to know about it. If you are paying attention,” she said, “you’re honoring some part of the natural world.”

Then, after a pause: “We could really learn from nature. We should.”

There is a barn owl that lives in the yard right outside Susan’s bedroom window. Sometimes it wakes her in the middle of the night, Whooo Whooo. Full moons affect her too... vivid dreams, heightened energy, difficulty sleeping. I am not surprised that she is sensitive to the moon, an attunement to things most people move past without noticing. Susan pays attention to those subtle shifts, both in the cycles of nature and cycles in herself.

The moon painting hanging on her wall grew out of that feeling. Night after night she woke to moonlight spilling across the bed until eventually she thought: I want the moon near me. Impossible, obviously. So she painted it instead. Luminous and close, and tucked right in there is the owl in the tree.

Spirit animals, she confirmed when I asked. Absolutely.

She told me her friends often say that whenever they see a crow, they think of her. I understood why immediately. She shares something with them... intelligent, observant, resourceful, slightly outside the expected. And funny. Crows are funny.

I want to talk about the charcoal, because Susan talked about it with a kind of reverence I found genuinely moving. I think this is one of her cycles.

Charcoal is burnt wood. She knows this in her bones. When she picks up a stick of it, she is holding something that was once part of a living tree, transformed by fire into a tool for making marks. And the paper she draws on... that's wood pulp too. Pressed and flattened and dried into sheets. So when she draws a tree with charcoal on paper, she is using the forest to draw the forest. Using what has already been transformed to render what still stands. Is this seeing the forest through the trees?- sorry bad joke, I couldn’t resist.

"It's like an alchemist," I said. She lit up... yes, exactly like that.

Because that really is what she's doing... using pieces of the natural world to understand it. Burnt branches on tree pulp, rendering the very trees they came from. Pretty full circle moment if you ask me.

She talked about erasing as part of the process... not correction, but discovery. She showed me pieces where she had worked back into the darkness with an eraser, pulling light out of shadow, finding what was hidden underneath.

"I find the light," she said simply.

Finding the light through the darkness. Note to self.

Her charcoal work is where her inner world lives most openly. She described the trajectory: she started painting as an observer, looking outward at landscapes, at the pretty Connecticut scenery she felt safe rendering. Then something shifted. She picked up charcoal and just went wild. Dense, tangled, dark, alive. She didn't show those drawings to anyone for a long time.

"Maybe it freaks people out," she said. But at least she did it anyway.

A mentor at Yale... the painter and professor Robert Reid, whom she described as brilliant and sweet and deeply gifted... was the one who finally told her to stop trying to paint and just do charcoal. Just keep doing that. He saw what was happening when she let herself go. He wanted her to keep going. She did.

CLAY

And then there is the clay.

Susan hand-builds most of her ceramic work... rolling out slabs, coiling thick ropes of clay, constructing forms piece by piece. Some pieces she slip-casts, pouring liquid clay into plaster molds she makes herself. The piece she donated to our foundation was built from thick coils of Black Mountain clay, a sandy, ancient-feeling material. She was trying a technique that felt like something people had done for thousands of years. Because they had.

What she loves most about clay, she told me, is that you cannot dominate it. You can have intentions. The clay has its own.

"It will pop back if you move it somehow," she said. "It wants to be a different shape. You can't force it."

She described working with clay as a relationship, a conversation. "It's a relationship with the clay definitely and you're talking to each other." She often doesn't know what she's making when she starts. "The form reveals itself." You show up. You listen. You follow.

The fiddlehead ferns she's rendered in clay... those tightly coiled fronds... sitting atop a jug or vase were just lovely. It’s nice she can look at them here in a moe permanent form as she describes herself as having a brown thumb when it comes to gardening and I know from experience these fiddlehead ferns are sensitive and like to die… haha.

Then we started talking about the shadow self... the parts of us we're taught early to keep hidden. She grew up in a household where asking too many questions was dangerous. She learned to think freely in private. She kept her inner life behind careful landscapes and safe drawings. For a long time, the dark charcoal pieces... the ones that looked like her actual interior... stayed out of sight.

"There are a few people in my life that weren't too happy about that," she said.

She's still freeing herself. She said that plainly. She still pulls back sometimes, still hesitates, still feels the old grooves of self-judgment. But something is loosening. "There's something brewing," she said. She could feel it. And looking around her studio... at the moon painting, the owl feathers, the clay ferns, the charcoal horse skull... I could feel it too.

The Album Cover

At one point she pointed to a drawing hanging on the wall... a portrait of a Black woman with long elegant arms, rendered with the same careful attention Susan gives everything she touches. She looked regal. Like a queen. The image came from a jazz album cover... Like Blue, André Previn.

Jazz was everywhere in her childhood. She grew up in West Philadelphia during the race riots in a strict Lutheran household, and her father deeply loved jazz and Black musicians. Yet he was also, as Susan described plainly, bigoted. As a little girl, she could not reconcile those two things.

“I just couldn’t understand how he loved jazz so much,” she said.

So she drew the woman from the album cover. She drew her like royalty... because that was what she saw. Beauty. Dignity. Presence. A Black princess, in a world where people around her acted as though such a thing did not exist.

“Let’s study Africa,” she said, repeating what she remembered feeling at the time, her voice carrying a quiet sharpness.

The drawing felt like both an act of love and an act of resistance, created privately through the safety of her own hands. Susan grew up understanding early that questioning authority came with consequences. She watched her sister, who spoke more openly, get punished for it. So Susan learned something different: how to protect her inner freedom.

If I keep it in my head and don’t say anything, I can still have freedom of thought.

But art became another language. A way to say what could not safely be said aloud.

She also grew up in a predominantly Catholic and Jewish neighborhood as “the Protestant girl floating in between,” as she put it, which taught her how to observe people closely... how to exist slightly outside the center of things.

What moved me the most was the intelligence of the gesture, she couldn’t have been more than 6. Faced with prejudice she could not argue against directly, she answered it with beauty. Her father could hear the soul and brilliance in Black music but could not move past skin color, and even as a child Susan recognized the contradiction. So she drew this woman... radiant, elegant, undeniable... as if to say: Look at her. How could you possibly not see her humanity? Her beauty?

It was subtle and not subtle at all, and she has held on to it, still on her wall after all these years.

CODING

Susan is also a programmer. Here was this deeply intuitive artist surrounded by owls and moon paintings and clay ferns... and she also had a razor sharp analytical mind that most people in any field would envy. She mentioned her sister had a high IQ, almost in passing. I think she was being modest. Hers soared.

She's a real programmer too... self-taught, starting in high school when she was one of the only girls in calculus, continuing through graphic design work and a night school coding course she almost quit. She described the moment she first got a webpage to display in a browser... no server, just a text file dragged into Chrome, the words hello world appearing on the screen... and her face did something I recognized. It was the same expression she got talking about charcoal and clay.

"It was like magic," she said.

Who finds magic in coding? Susan did.

Coding taught her to think in three dimensions. The loops and matrices of programming opened up a kind of spatial visualization she hadn't had before. And that spatial thinking fed directly into her ceramics... into the way she builds forms in her mind before her hands even touch the clay.

THE ART

The art Susan has donated to The Aragon Foundation auction come from two of her collections: the White Collection, with its Norwegian-influenced decorative elements and quiet ceramic forms, and the Ancients Collection, which carries the weight of deep time... of bones and feathers and things that were once alive and still feel that way. They are pieces made by someone who has been paying attention for a very long time.

I mentioned that some of the prints felt like they were about water. She nodded saying she once spent a long stretch of time studying watersheds, making posters for children about how water moves through a landscape, how it flows and connects and finds its way.

Are you a water sign?

Cancer, she said.

Of course. Cancer is a water sign, ruled by the moon... deeply intuitive, emotionally intelligent, creative and resilient, with a hard shell protecting a tender and feeling interior. The kind of person who picks up on what isn't being said just as readily as what is. The kind of person who wakes up when the moon is full because something in them already knows. It was all right there... the water running through her artwork, the moon painting on the wall, the pull toward nature she couldn't quite explain, the inner world she kept hidden for so long behind safe landscapes. It made complete sense. The water was always there, running underneath everything, finding its way through.

"It's like a drive," she said near the end. "Some kind of human drive to connect."

Susan is one of a few artists generously donating work to our upcoming auction, and spending time with her reminded me why this foundation exists... not just to put art into people's hands, but to honor the kind of deep, lifelong creative practice that shapes a person from the inside out.

And that is exactly what we are trying to build with this foundation... spaces and opportunities for that drive to find its expression, for every person who has something burning in them and just needs a little room to let it out.

Our auction is Saturday, May 9th. Come see what Susan has made. Come connect with something that means it.