Our Demons are Translucent

Large mixed-media drawings by Susan Calza

On view February 3- March 25, 2022

Gallery Hours:
Fridays 11am - 6pm
Saturdays 11am - 6pm
By appointment: susancalza@gmail.com

I’m looking at this work from the distance of time, of a decade ago.

I had spent 3 months in Nepal on two occasions and in retrospect I see how deeply influenced I was by the fluidity of that culture’s relationship to living and dying.

The visual and hyper religious vibrancy was often overwhelming but it was the most intimate things that remain in my mind.  Tiny puja offerings were everywhere, on every street corner in Kathmandu.  Seemingly insignificant smears of pigment were pressed into the cracks of crumbling 15th century buildings.  Grains of rice mixed with marigold leaves were meticulously laid along the decaying corpse of a mouse. 

These humble shrines were the undercurrent of life honoring intimacy with death.

They were repeated over and over by generations of fingers mixing ochre and red earth pigments with prayer.

Durga is respected as an honored and vengeful goddess.  She requires sacrifice and yet she gives life as freely as she takes it.

My young Newari friend’s mother had died 6 months before and he went out of his way to walk me to her cremation site.  It was along the river as all of these sites are.

He showed me the fire of grief in his paintings with no trace of self consciousness or embarrassment.  

He spoke of offering the devastation of his loss to the dark waters of what appeared to me, a polluted river.

He mother’s ashes were dissolved in that slowly moving water, away from the living, after the funeral pyre had done its work.

Looking at this work now I think “of course, yes”… my life is changed and changing by this intimacy as I enter my seventh decade.

Clicking on an image will enlarge it.