Music

Once Upstate New York locals sense that an early winter is on its way, they can count on a few short weeks of spectacular weather, where amber-leafed sugar maples and auburn birches sway in the warm breeze. At the end of a rocky dirt road, surrounded by this cinematic countryside, is the bright blue barn where Susan Weinthaler has her home and studio, a somewhat refreshingly expected modern cliché of the city slicker planting their artsy ideal, somehow blending perfectly with nature. Purchased in 2002, the rustic 7 acres were eventually tamed to accommodate the creative dwelling she shares with her husband and adult son. While still keeping their NYC West Village apartment, the family only moved (mostly) full-time to Narrowsburg, about 100 miles from Manhattan, in 2023.

Susan, wearing a paint-stained apron and straw Western hat with feathers, greets me with a big, easy smile accompanied by her elderly shepherd mix, Bacon. Around the back of the barn are large, moveable walls, 16-foot by 16-foot when open; Susan easily pushes them from side to side to work, as she says, in plein-air. In every way, this is where nature meets art. And vice versa.

“What do you see when you look out here?” I ask her, staring over the somewhat manicured lawn towards the wild carrot-colored woodlands.

“Waves,” she says, of the major visual theme within her art, including her most-recent work-in-progress, a representation of jazz. Energy waves, air waves, magnetic waves, sound waves: she’s right when she says that once you start “going there in your mind” it’s easy to get sucked in. While she’s a devoted student of wave theory, she’s quick to say she’s doing her own thing: “I’m just taking it in my own different direction.”

Once inside the parted walls there’s talk about the construction of the place, how her background in theater made her a skilled carpenter and not afraid of heights, helpful when the house arrived in a kit and she and her husband, Josh, set to assemble the barn mostly themselves. They have been working on the Barn—in this context she uses a capital “B”—for over 20 years. “You could hang a car from those trusses,” she says pointing proudly upward towards the 27-foot peak. The room is a very full, fascinating spot, with wood planks and pieces assembled or contained on and in nearly every surface, pine being her current base of choice. A precision saw, speckled in sawdust, sits on a pedestal in the back of the room overlooking the landscape. To its right, two bins collect curve-cut pieces: One is for keeps, the other discards. To me, they look similar, but to Susan, the second bin will eventually be used for firewood. Maybe. Sometimes she changes her mind. “How does anyone decide anything?” she asks with a shrug, noting that trusting her gut is everything, worrying that humans are devolving out of their own intuition.

These pieces of wood are her signature—handheld flat-ish blocks of various sizes she refers to as Bits. Once shaped and carved, she then designs each piece to come together as a cohesive work or theme. The result is an intriguing sculptural story, alone or together. They are backed with magnets that will— if she has anything to say about it—adorn any metal surface, with or without invitation: gallery doors, city lampposts, cars. And, of course, for her commissions with Starbucks, Google, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute (to name a humble few), as well as private clientele, they install steel walls to display her art in their space. 

Her earlier question—“How does anyone decide anything?”—is both answered and not answered throughout her art, as each piece is meant to be moveable to create something new based on whoever is interacting with it. And yes, this is art that’s meant to be touched, moved, changed, and even stolen (which delights her), never the same from moment to moment. This is also art that’s meant to stay the same, until someone intervenes. By this theory, Susan’s work is as guerilla and as high-end as the piece dictates; as personalized and as “for the people” as she and the client choose. (Or, perhaps, as the beholder chooses.) At Starbucks in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the entire piece got stolen, Bit by Bit. “I knew it would,” she says cheerily.

This isn’t the running ethos of most creatives, specifically visual artists who often “complete their work.” So, the answer to “How does anyone decide anything?” is that when it comes to Susan’s art, they don’t have to.

“When you come down to infinite possibilities, you have to let that go, too because there’s so many possibilities,” she says. “How can I even expect to get the right one? Maybe I get lots of right ones. That’s why I’ve designed my artwork the way I did it, so it was infinitely flexible. Because I think as an artist, that is one of the hardest things. When you have a blank canvas, and you look at it, and you’re about ready to start, that is the most exciting and terrifying time of an artist. When you have infinite possibility, and you’re like, ‘I have to make a choice back to the decision-making. How do I decide what is more important and what goes together?’ When I was developing this notion of Bits and magnetic artwork, what drew me to it, magnetically speaking, pun intended, is that I would never have to make those decisions. I would create the parts, the Bits, hence the name Bits, and then who am I to say what the right one is? It’s so liberating giving that up.”

It is, however, the ethos of musicians, who actively know and understand that their work is a literal living, breathing thing. Jazz—scat or otherwise—is specifically renowned for its lack of permanence. Thus, Susan’s newest project: her signature Bits as jazz.

“Why am I making art about music? Because music is an integral part of all life, invisible and powerful, like magic. It’s an elemental force of nature I want to explore and understand better.” When her grandmother was 16 she played the piano for silent films and later had an all-women’s jazz band in Ithaca in the 1920s while attending Cornell. “She was a fierce pianist, and I feel her blood in my body,” Susan says.  When she was a girl, Susan played both piano and saxophone, but stopped making music in high school when a guidance counselor told her it wasn’t possible to do both art and music, and she had to choose between them. “Alas, I did. I chose art,” she says.

Music, however, always remained an influence. In college, while studying print-making, she discovered Matisse’s Jazz, first published in 1947, a collection of his works created from 1943 to 1947. “He captured the essence of jazz with shapes and colors, but one thing eluded him. He couldn’t harness improvisation, the true soul of jazz. It can’t be static, it needs infinite flexibility, and my work can do that. It can improvise. It is designed for jazz.”

We discuss how change is the only constant, while standing in her studio and looking out at the soon-to-be-bare autumn trees. “Improvisation is the key element of life, the quintessential nature of nature,” she says. “Existence, instinct, and evolution all rely on it, and that is certainly worth making art about. I’ve been thinking about this piece for years, I can hardly wait to sink my teeth in. “

We wind around to her office, a stark, organized room with track lighting, a desk, and a long table where she sits down with agents and clients to talk commissions. It’s very white, including the art. One piece is created out of different sized balls, currently assembled in a thought-bubble pattern on a white wall. If you’re like me, you’re trained not to touch such things that look perfect and deliberate. I’ve already learned that if you voice this, Susan will immediately pluck a piece from the wall and shift it elsewhere, because, as she says, that’s the whole point. 

“I’ve had potential clients who’d be like, ‘Oh my God, I can never rearrange it. I need for you to come over and do arrangements for me.’ I’m like, ‘Then you can’t buy it because that’s the whole point.’ The people who buy my art are the ones that are like, ‘Awesome, I’m going to keep it moving.’”

It’s not that she can’t make something permanent. If it serves a client, sure. For the installation at Nordstrom in New York City, it wasn’t possible to have a flexible piece. “I have compromised my vision in the pursuit of trying new things and doing bigger projects, and eating. Oh, there’s that eating part. Getting paid. I don’t like making art that’s fixed. I’ve done it. The piece at Nordstrom in the lobby on Broadway is 19 feet long by 11 feet high. It’s so big, but it’s all fixed. You cannot steal it. That’s just an apple compared to an orange.”

We drift into the last room of her studio tour, which has a large draft table in the middle. Black steel panels line two walls with projects on them. To the left is an inspiration board, combined with some “Bits” from a commission. She pulls a lugnut from the board and presents it to me; it has three silver, sparkly metal bulbs on top, secured by magnets. A ring. I slide it on my hand as she talks about a piece she made in February called “Bling,” which eventually evolved into a portrait. 

The jazz piece, in progress, is to the right. It’s currently bare wood arranged in her perception of the genre: waves upon waves, with inspiration and research hung up next to it. “Jazz, it’s improvisation that is such a huge influence on this organism that I’m making, and it’s the flexibility where it’s never the same twice,” she says. “That’s so exciting because you don’t know what’s going to come out. Even in an orchestrated piece, it’s never the same twice. All performances are different. Yes, jazz, improvisation. Totally, dude.”

In music, there can be collaboration, something Susan says she misses sometimes. “I’m a solitary creature out here in the woods, and that’s cool. That’s a choice. One thing I love about musicians is you do it with people. You’ve come to this plane, they call it flow, where your minds all meet and you groove out. I am so jealous of that. That’s what I’d like to capture, too, in this piece.”

The current arrangement of the jazz piece, to me, looks perfect as is. Before I can get too used to it, she goes over and starts shifting the pieces around. “Music is organized sound waves, so that’s what I’m making. I’m making waves. Ha!”

To learn more, visit weinthaler.com.