A poem in everyday language, approachable for all readers. This short work by Suzan Lind, a gifted contemporary writer-artist, relates the struggle of every person to find meaning.
The poem ends with the accessible but frequently passed-over truth: meaning does not have to be sought - it is already around us, always.
Accompanying graphics are striking, and available from Suzan's collected works (Bluebell Design Studios).
Mead-Hill website: www.mead-hill.com
Suzan Lind grew up with her five siblings in New York, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. Living in a small apartment close to the Verrazano Bridge, they played stickball in the street and enjoyed the best pizza money could buy!
In a family of eight, with money tight, Suzan learned early the magic of making things from nothing. Some of her fondest memories are of those early days filled with creative play - decorating shop windows around Halloween, knitting, and sewing her own clothes, costume-making, baking and decorating cakes, spending endless hours with her sisters, writing and drawing at the kitchen table.
In her paintings, Suzan rarely sketches an image before brush meets canvas. Acrylics are never thinned - instead, they are applied to canvas directly, creating bold splashes of vivid color. Her paintings can be found from New York to Hong Kong.
Suzan's graphics also can be found everywhere: from cosmetic bags to mugs, scarves to playing cards, laptop cases to furniture, murals, and fine gift merchandise. They are regularly licensed for prints, paper goods, t-shirts, cell-phone cases and everyday household items.
As with Suzan's painting and graphics, so with her writing. There, the same avoidance of stylistic imitation allows for an unrestrained creative flow, something easily evident in the joyous freedom and innocence of her paintings, and the youthful explorations in her writing. Suzan loves the challenge of sailing into the unknown with some new work, of the joy of finding the element of importance inside it, the thing which will yield the greatest reward to both writer and reader.
When she has the time, Suzan loves to return to writings from times past, only then perhaps finally having the opportunity to understand completely what was there in the first place, to recognize where it had come from and what it meant and means. This, after all, is the same discovery that applies to readers and viewers of any great work of art: the meanings will change constantly, providing, as Picasso once put it, "a lie that tells the truth."
Suzan cherishes such moments: time stands still; hours go by but feel like mere moments. Most especially, she reveres those rare occasions which great artists sometimes note, those times when a work seems to have "passed through" them rather than having originated in them, a true visitation of the numinous.
