Tribute

For Sue Hertel

When I was a little girl
I would wander out of the swarm
of people of the Pueblo.
I would go into the hills,
by the stream,
and be with the rocks and birds.
I would talk with me, with them,
while I got dizzy off the moving light
on the flowing water.
I laughed and ran with the wind
Blowing the flags of grass. 
I loved that world,   I still do. Years passed and I met another
who felt the same—someone with
the feeling of the hills, of the stream,
of the rocks.
She was there with light in her face,
with shadows in her hair,
with waves of flowing time in her being.
We hugged
and I looked into the wells of her eyes…
it was familiar
like a sister without explanations. No explanations…but… It is there in the smile
that forms in her being
and breaks like the sun… on her face.
It is encircling strength and beauty
when I can feel that smile
forming on my own face.
It is again the flowing 
in and around 
the hills, rocks, streams
into timelessness
where
I am her and she is me.

– Rina Swentzell  

Remembering Sue Hertel

March 24, 1993

Sue Hertel is dead at age 63. I first met Sue 40 years ago. I was a sophomore at Pomona College, doing my art classes at Scripps College. I never met her formally. No one ever introduced us. She was already established on the premises. I was an invisible undergrad, just another art student. Only as I began to assert myself as a “serious” art student did Sue begin to recognize me as a person. That doesn’t mean that she ever acknowledged my presence or that we became friends. She was 4 years older and light-years wiser.

In those days, Sue was a rather formidable young woman. She was a no-nonsense, serious artist. This was 1953, years before Women’s Lib or the Feminist movement. Sue was way ahead of her time. She was special. She was more than willing to compete against the boys. Because of her talent and commitment, her passionate commitment to art, she established herself as an artist. She could draw and she could paint and she never wavered.

In the 40 years I knew her she never wavered. Sue never cared that art was male-dominated. She saw that there was room for exceptional talents like Mary Cassatt and Suzanne Veladon. And over the years as she matured as an artist, she became one of the very best of her generation. She was a class act. There was something patrician about her, innately aristocratic. She held her head high. I think that she was truly proud of herself, of what she had accomplished. Most of all, most important of all for the artist, she knew her work was special.

As a young artist, I had two role models there at Scripps. One was Jack Zajac and the other was Sue. From them I learned that to be a real artist meant to do real work, to be totally committed, to never look back. That’s the way we were then. That’s the way we kept on being. The young Sue was striking in appearance with fine features and raven black hair. She was beautiful because of an inner radiance. She radiated conviction and integrity. Her work was inviolate.

Throughout the 4 decades that I knew her and saw her as an assistant to Millard Sheets, as a wife and mother, as an exhibiting artist, as a resident of Claremont, Glendora, and New Mexico, her artwork was a constant. It will remain as an enduring monument to her unwavering vision. She painted all the things she loved and cared about. She lived a full life, a rich and rewarding life. I will miss her and I will always respect her for who she was and for what she was: a very fine person and a very fine artist.

– James Strombotne  

A CASUALTY

A CASUALTY “Yes,” she said, “when the Gulf war started,
I felt as though someone had kicked a hole
In my immune system.” Then the same old long-defeated
cancer jumped out from behind the door, and went
for her lungs.   No more years
to paint, to watch her horses and her young apple trees,
her little, lonely house made of earth, her dogs
and cats, the serrated blue lines
of the hills, the space, the light, the clouds, the bones
in the wash that seemed to be hallucinatory
wings, the shapes of unconditioned angels. It was time then
to leave the low, clear light still shining
through the mare’s white tail as it streamed
like cirrus, and the shapes, the entrancing shapes
and colors of everything, the mysterious, holy way
they all made patterns together: the studio door,
her visiting daughter’s neon-colored shoes, the creosote bush,
the stars, the falling snow, the gate in the fence, the belly
of her black horse, the rumpled bed covers; even as they shifted
in their endless dance. She loved them all,
and human beings too, if they would only
keep back a little, give her the room she needed,
the wordlessness, spare her their clamor, leave her
to praise, work, be, to use her full powers
in the paintings, each a strong attempt to do something
never quite possible, to hold quiet, to make visible
the moving, invisible breath; that breath
in which she could often sense her spirit quivering
like a mote of dust; the immense, living soul
that she could feel within and without – that welled up
inside her – that carried her – that breathed her – that breathes her still.

– Kate Barnes

“I am an Immigrant among the Animals”

The Art of Susan Hertel with excerpts by Mary Davis MacNaughton

The everyday already is the real miracle, the core of what life is about.
Within that repetitive framework, you’re free to experience another level.
SUSAN HERTEL’S ART embodies what is marvelous in the mundane experiences of life.

In her paintings and poems Hertel pictures a state of mind that finds joy and serenity in daily rituals, in the simple pleasures of work, and the quiet moments in between them. Her art centers on the people, creatures, and places she most intimately knew: her five children, a menagerie of animals including horses, dogs, cats, and goats-and her ranches in Glendora, California, and Cerrillos, New Mexico. In her paintings she gave dignity to these humble characters and places and transformed the prosaic activities of daily life into poetic images transfixed by memory.

Hertel’s art is extraordinary for the constancy and consistency of its themes and the profound serenity of its vision. Beginning with her student work, she focused on her immediate surroundings and the people and animals who lived with her. What changed over time was her shifting focus from interior to outdoor spaces and from other people to herself and her animals. Nevertheless, from her early to her late works, her approach was remarkably consistent; that is, as a painter she saw her subjects-whether landscapes or people-as elements in a still life. “Shape and placement are what I’m most interested in,” she recalled, “how forms interrelate.” Fundamentally, there is stillness at the center of her art that echoes still life. Moreover, throughout her work, people do not have priority over animals. “I just don’t want any figure to dominate. It’s a feeling of being part of the universe: equal weight for every element.” As years went by, animals became increasingly important in her art; ultimately, through their images she expressed her lifelong connection with nature.

Susan Bright Lautmann was born on July 19, 1930 to Edith May Shultz Lautmann and Herbert Moses Lautmann. She and her fraternal twin, Sally, were the youngest of five children born to their Jewish father and Protestant mother. The other children included two older brothers, Bob (b. 1917) and Ralph (b. 1927), and an older sister Marilyn (b. 1922). Susan grew up in a large, three story, Tudor-style house on Waverly Road in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois. Situated on five acres, the house had a view through the trees of Lake Michigan. In that house Susan developed an abiding love of nature and became sensitive to the special power of places. In the backyard, there had been a Native American fire circle, and its stones, still visibly indented in the soil, made a strong impression on her. Her sister Marilyn recalled that a historian told the family that the circle was a sacred spot and the branches of nearby trees bent in its direction. By the back door, the house also had a bell, which to the girls was a symbol of the farm that it had once been. Susan’s later interest in Native American art, the character of places, and the life of animals had their roots in her childhood in this house.

The Lautmann home was full of dogs and cats, with ducks and a goat outside. When Susan and Sally were children, they each had a cocker spaniel, their mother had a German shepherd, and their father had a golden retriever and a Labrador. When the twins were nine years old, their mother let them select a goat from a local farm to bring to their summer home at Lake Geneva. Later Susan raised dogs and Nubian goats, many of which appeared in her paintings and poems. As a young child, Susan also developed a passion for horses. Almost every weekend, she and Sally saw Arabian horses at G and R Stables in Highland Park and, during summers, they went to Williams Bay on Lake Geneva in Wisconsin, where they had a lakeside house and rode horses at a nearby farm. At the age of thirteen, Susan and Sally went for six weeks to a Montana ranch at Lake Flatland, where they rode horses twice a day. Both of Susan’s parents encouraged creativity, but Mrs. Lautmann had a more active role in her children’s artistic education. A pianist herself, Susan’s mother took her children to concerts and plays in Chicago. In the summer, she also introduced them to performances at Ravinia. Although both girls had piano lessons, Sally was more musical than Susan, who instead preferred art. Nevertheless, Susan developed a love of singing that continued throughout her life. Susan’s mother took the twins at the age of nine and ten to a drawing class in Winnetka, and later to a woodcarving class in Deerfield. Susan immediately became absorbed in drawing and, while she attended Highland Park High School, she also took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. A shy girl, she enjoyed reading and writing in her journal. Her sister Marilyn recalled that sometimes it was easier for Susan to write than to talk about her feelings.

Mrs. Lautmann became ill after the birth of the twins. The doctor recommended that to improve her health, she should spend the winter in a warmer climate; so she and Mr. Lautmann would go for extended periods to Tucson, Arizona. After he returned to Illinois, the girls would visit their mother and, to fill their days, would spend many hours riding. Susan adored her mother and would rub her feet to make her feel better; however, her mother’s illness worsened so that eventually she was attended by nurses. In the winter, her mother’s absence for medical treatment created long separations for Susan. “In our house and between each of us, there were big spaces, a sense of isolation,” she recalled. As a young girl, she channeled her energy into drawing horses, an interest that helped her cope with the loneliness she felt. During this time, she began to develop independence, which gave her an early sense of direction. “I drew, read voraciously, and very early began to relate to animals. Somehow, I turned myself inside out, making what’s around me very important.” As a preteen, Susan filled sketchbooks with detailed drawings of horses. In high school, she focused both on art and academic classes, in which she excelled. In 1945, when the twins were fifteen, their mother had a stroke and died at home. During this traumatic time, their father sold the family’s big house and moved into a residential hotel in the same community so that the twins could finish high school.

In 1948 the girls left home; Sally went to Pomona College, and Susan enrolled at Scripps College, where her older sister Marilyn had attended from 1940 to 1942. Sally and Susan shared a car, but otherwise they went separate ways in college. While at Scripps, Susan continued to ride horses and in her first year often went riding at dusk in the foothills. One of her riding companions, Kate Beston, who became her best friend at Scripps, recalled meeting Susan:

” Dusk fell, the evening star rose over our left shoulders, and still the horses walked on into the darkness. No one wanted to turn back. A beautiful, dark-haired girl on my right sang, ‘Oh, that Strawberry Roan,’ a song I’d never heard before, which seemed to give a voice to all the magic of place and time. Or did the magic come from this particular girl’s spirits? Her name was Susan Lautmann, and she was an art major from Illinois and the best student in her class. Even then, as a freshman, she was strikingly independent in a way that was unusual at the time. Did it, I wonder, have anything to do with the fact that her mother had died when she was a child? “

Susan’s independence was also evident to Kate in their discussions about an ideal education. Susan’s proposal was that each freshman should be left in a strange city with only two week’s worth of money. After a year, the student would be picked up and her choices evaluated. If she were working in a job that fulfilled her interest, she would be admitted to college. If she had found a job just to make ends meet she would be given one more year. If, however, she had given up and called for help, then she would not qualify to go on to college. In Susan’s mind, she had probably already passed this kind of test by having to make her own choices since the illness and death of her mother. During college, Susan was also self-reliant and resourceful. For example, to help pay for food she had charged at a Claremont cafe, she began a sandwich business in her dormitory. With the profits from this small enterprise, she saved money to buy her own horse, a big bay she named John Doe. In college Susan found a fresh beginning. In 1985 she recalled that Scripps offered her a refuge where she could develop her artistic self: “My favorite dreams are about houses in which I discover new rooms or whole new wings. What makes them so satisfying is the sense of possibilities of new beauty and width, the reminder of the universe’s generosity. Scripps was, for me, one of these dreams. For me, it really was the beginning of a new life.”

Susan was especially influenced by the three-year Humanities course, in which her favorite professors were philosophers Philip, and Francesca Merlin and classicist Robert Palmer. She took classes in the history of art and architecture from Dr. Alois Schardt at Pomona College. In studio art, her mentors were at Scripps. The chairman of the art department was Millard Sheets, who in the 1930s had gained a national reputation as a regionalist painter of southern California landscapes. In the 1940’s Sheets assembled an art faculty at Scripps College who were not only excellent teachers but also prominent artists. Two members of the faculty came from the East, sculptor Albert Stewart, who had made his reputation in public sculpture, and painter Henry Lee McFee, who had been a founding member of the art colony in Vloodstock, New York. The third studio faculty member was Jean Ames who, along with her husband Arthur, was a leading designer. At Scripps, Susan studied drawing with Millard Sheets, design with Jean Ames, sculpture with Albert Stewart, and painting with Henry Lee McFee.

Both Sheets and McFee helped to shape Hertel’s early work. Through Sheets she developed an interest in public art, especially mural painting and mosaics, which later led to her long collaboration with him on architectural design projects. She also shared with Sheets a passionate interest in horses, and her student work demonstrates the impact of his stylized drawing. Sheets’s strong advocacy of realism was also influential Yet it was McFee, known by his students as “Uncle Lee,” who had the greatest impact on her thinking as a painter and her interest in still life. From McFee, “Susan learned the craft of painting, the integrity of materials, and a classical attitude toward composition,” her husband Carl Hertel recalled. Moreover, she learned a basic approach to painting from McFee, which was to envision her subjects as still life’s. Indeed, McFee’s teaching at Scripps focused almost exclusively on still life painting. In her later work, even when she painted figures and landscapes, she treated each object as if it were an element in a still life. McFee also instilled in Susan the notion that painting was a serious enterprise. Another student, Jim Hueter, who recalled that McFee called his male students “Doctor, ” described McFee’s pedagogical style as authoritarian. For example, during critiques, he did not hesitate to lean over students’ shoulders and paint directly on their work to make corrections. Yet when he visited Susan in her studio, he seldom put his brush to her canvas because he was pleased with her work. She developed a friendship with McFee and his wife, who often invited her and other students to dinners at their house in Padua Hills, north of Claremont.

Susan’s artistic ability was recognized quickly by her teachers. In 1949-50, as a sophomore, she was allowed to paint in a studio at the south end of Seal Pond courtyard in the Lang art building. There she worked with Jack Zajac, a talented young man whom Millard Sheets allowed to take art classes on an unofficial status although he was not enrolled at the Claremont Colleges. Zajac recalled that “thanks to my friendship with Sue, I became more of a serious artist. In Sue I found another person who was passionate about painting. That studio was the center of my life for eighteen months. We painted almost every night…and we all had extraordinary growth in our work.” Sharing the studio with Susan and Jack was another Scripps student, Marie-Anne Poniatowska, a beautiful young woman with a European back ground, who had moved to California when her parents settled in Santa Barbara. After attending the University of California, Santa Barbara, at the age of eighteen she had transferred to Scripps. Like Susan, Marie-Anne was a precocious talent, who had a special interest in figural painting. In their studio, she completed a large triptych, whose monumental and simplified figures recalled Mexican mural painting and whose complex composition was evidence of her artistic ambition.

Kate Barnes recalled the seriousness, intensity, and concentration that Susan brought to her work during this period:

“Susan was always a person who appreciated silence Visitors to the Scripps studio that she shared with her great friends, the painters MarieAnne Poniatowska and Jack Zajac, were often chilled by the silence with which she greeted their well-meaning little remarks about her work. Eager in a heart-felt conversation, she had little tolerance, then or ever, for social chit-chat. It was as though she had so much to do in one life that there was no time to spare for talk without meaning.”

At the same time, Susan combined hard work with a sense of joie de vivre. She recalled: “We worked all hours, weekends, vacations, it [Scripps] was a wonderfully free and encouraging place to begin a life of art. Quality was felt to be important. Discipline was expected to be life long. High spirits were not discouraged.” The three young artists formed a tight group, who didn’t welcome intruders. “Anyone who set up their easels there got flies painted on their still life apples and other such indignities,” Susan remembered. They also played practical jokes; for example, while painting chickens, they substituted a frying pan and eggs for the hens. They were also irreverent toward artists whom they felt were self-important or pretentious. In particular, they parodied social realism’s sober propagandizing and surrealism’s zealous illusionism. As Zajac recalled:

“We had a notebook of sayings that never reached print. At that time there were artists who were humorless and who had a comic intensity in their devotion. We made fun of certain social realists with ‘101 messages for the Social Consciousness.’ We would skewer not only any ‘Holier than Thou’ painter, but we also poked fun at the magic realists with topics like ‘1001 Highlights and How to Achieve them”.

As an undergraduate, Susan realized that men dominated the art world and success for a woman was difficult. Those in her own circle were mostly male graduate art students, such as Paul Darrow, Doug McClelland, and Roger Kuntz, who had returned to school on the G.l. Bill. They became her friends and colleagues with whom she shared camaraderie as well as professional experience. Once a week, they hired a model and met for drawing sessions in the studio on the north side of Seal Pond courtyard. As Darrow recalled, “She was one of the few women painters we took seriously. We teased her, but not about her art. We respected her. She was a valid member of the gang”. He and his colleagues immediately recognized her talent and determination, which were evident, even at the age of twenty.

Sheets often visited Susan, Marie-Anne, and Jack in their studio. Zajac remembered that Sheets was a glamorous presence, an inspiring image, always infectious and enthusiastic in his belief that art had worth and purpose. When Sheets traveled, he would bring in a visiting artist, whose art was different from his own. As a result, his students were introduced to a variety of artistic approaches. For example, during the summer of 1949, Francis de Erdely exposed them to a more expressionist style than they had seen with Sheets or McFee. The following year, painter Sueo Serisawa focused their attention on abstract painting and eastern philosophy. McClelland recalled that Serisawa’s paint handling was looser and his surfaces thicker than those of McFee.

Serisawa taught students his special paint mixture-one part casein, one part tempera white, and one part oil white-which allowed one to work quickly and build up the surface. Darrow recalled that they also admired the figurative work of painters Philip Guston and Rico LeBrun. Abstract expressionism was still not well known to the group, who only saw small reproductions in art magazines of paintings by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Sheets was critical of abstract expressionism, which he saw as a rejection of public art in favor of inward expression. Whereas Sheets felt the artist should “build a bridge to the broader public,” these younger artists wanted to pursue a more subjective course.

Despite their common interests, this group developed individual styles. Whereas Marie-Anne was interested in the figural compositions of Renaissance artists Andrea Mantegna and Piero della Francesca, Susan admired the work of the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo. Her student painting of a nun is an early indicator of her interest in spiritual content. Later in her career, she left sacred subjects for secular ones, but infused them with a spiritual presence. The most important influence on her work during this time, however, was the still life painting of Paul Cezanne. “She was haunted by Cezanne. She used to paint landscapes in the same spirit,” Marie-Anne recalled. No doubt Susan found Cezanne through McFee, whose work emulated this post-impressionist painter. From Cezanne, Susan learned to manipulate space so that the elements in the composition would be visually connected on the surface of the picture plane. Fundamentally, what she saw in Cezanne was a way of constructing space through color, a technique that she developed in her own distinctive way throughout her painting.

At Scripps Susan met the photographer Max Yavno, who visited the campus and photographed students and the campus for his book entitled Los Angeles, Yavno made a portrait of her in the Seal Pond courtyard studio where she painted. He also took her into Los Angeles and introduced her to artists. During this time, she met the ceramist Peter Voulkos, who was teaching at Otis in Los Angeles. After Susan graduated from Scripps in 1952, she took classes from Yavno at the Kann Institute of Art on Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, where he taught. At the same time, she began to work on free-lance art projects. For example, she and Darrow helped Millard Sheets install exhibitions in the art building at the Pomona County Fair. Organized by Sheets, these exhibitions, which included loans from collections such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, brought extraordinary examples of European and Asian art to Southern California. Installing these works gave Susan the opportunity to see a wide array of fine art firsthand. After a year, Sheets also asked her to help him execute designs for two murals. This job as assistant became the beginning of a long association with Sheets.

In 1954 Susan reconnected with Carl Hertel, whom she had first met in 1949 when he was a student at Pomona College. From 1952 to 1954 Carl had completed a master’s degree in Far Eastern languages and history at Harvard, then had served in the army in New Mexico and Texas. Instead of writing a dissertation in literature, he returned to Claremont, where he entered the M.F.A. program at the Graduate School. There he worked with Jean Ames, Phil Dike, and Millard Sheets. Around 1954, Carl saw Susan again through her friend Kate Beston, who had married Dick Barnes. Susan and Carl would often visit Kate and Dick, who lived in Claremont over a bicycle shop, called the Acropolis, which became a meeting place for young artists and writers. In 1955 Susan traveled to Europe: her first stop was Rome, where she visited Jack Zajac, who was studying sculpture at the American Academy. They traveled together to Florence, and then she went to Spain and to Paris to visit Marie-Anne Poniatowska. In Paris, Susan was impressed by the work of a French fin-de-siecle painter, Pierre Bonnard. Susan recalled the impact his work had on her:

The most important thing happened just days before I came home. In Paris, I saw my first Bonnards. They opened up a whole new wing for me. Here was a painter who organized shapes and patterns in a way that was completely compelling to me, and his subjects were from his own personal environment. That, I realized, was what I wanted to paint also.

Inspired by what she had seen on her European trip, Susan returned to Claremont and began to paint with a new sense of purpose and direction. Her decision to draw her subjects from her own daily experience had been reinforced by the modern art she had seen in Paris. As she recalled, “I realized I wanted to portray what was in my house. From then on, I painted babies, fabrics, litters of puppies, and the inside of our “home”. In an upstairs apartment that she used as her studio, she painted Interior with Red Chairs, 1955, a picture that includes her friend Kate seated at a table reading. Here Susan demonstrates how she has absorbed the example of Bonnard in her construction of an intimate space, built through areas of color and pattern. Like Bonnard, she makes pattern the unifying element in the composition, the connective thread between object and ground, creating an approach to pattern that would inform her work for the rest of her career. During the 1950s Susan did not adopt the dominant contemporary style of abstract expressionism; rather, she continued to paint intimate interiors taken from her own life. As she recalled, “There was a long period of time to grow slowly and to find out who I was as an artist. Another early influence on her painting was Paul Gauguin, who used pattern in his art to connect not only the different forms in his compositions but also the disparate cultures they represented. Like Bonnard and Gauguin, she evoked still moments of time in which figures are united with their settings through pattern. Like these postimpressionist masters, Hertel created a vision of harmony between nature and art, but her images of this period, such as Early Moon and Untitled (Sleeping Dogs) convey the particular flavor of life on her ranch in Southern California in the early 1970s. There is a sense of ease that pervades her pictures of herself, her family, and her animals, an ease that she found in her daily living. “My work had a Lyrical quality to it, because my family life had that quality. There is also a sense of the spirituality to be found in the acts of living.” In 1987 she said, “Some people go on trips to look for new subject matter or gain fresh insight, but I prefer just going about my life, feeding my animals and watering my plants. But I think women have always been involved in the daily rituals like gardening and childcare”.

The recurring nature of daily rituals did not bore her but renewed her. Similarly, she enjoyed spiritual practice; each day she rose before dawn to practice yoga. “Any rhythmic repetition can be magical. That’s why I was drawn to chanting,” she explained. This sense of fusion between daily and spiritual life is embedded in all her pictures, which exude a sense of quiet at the center of life. Whether her painted characters ride horses, as in Early Moon, c. 1973 or sit indoors, as in Conversation, 1988 their mood is contemplative, as if the figures are simultaneously living a moment and contemplating it.

In 1958 Susan and Carl, moved to Upland, a community near Claremont. On April | 11, 1959, they were married and, the next year their family expanded with the birth of a son Morgan. Needing more space to paint and to keep horses, in 1961 they moved to Barking Dogs Ranch, an old sheep ranch in Glendora, which had an ivy-covered stone house. Of that house, reflected in Untitled (Woman with Cats), c. 1970 Kate Barnes recalled,

“The living room is round, with French doors spaced around the outside walls. A camel from a merry-go-round stands at one end of the room; India prints hang as curtains; there are Persian rugs and Navaho rugs on the floor; Susan’s squash blossom necklace dangles from a hook on the wall; there are paintings everywhere, they seem to glow on the walls”.

Carl turned the old bunkhouse nearby into a studio, where Susan painted works of her immediate surroundings, the foothills, and the animals on the ranch. In addition to rearing children, Susan and Carl raised dogs, horses, and Nubian goats, animals who became the central characters in her art.

At Barking Dogs Ranch, Susan painted not only canvases but also the hay room door where the horse’s head and trompel’oeil rein on the doorknob reveal her love of humor. During this time, she also began painting many other objects, including furniture, screens, bowls, spoons, and bones, which were as eagerly collected as her paintings. Although the objects were simple, she gave them what her husband Carl called the same “joy-filled attention” that imbued her canvases. In November 1961, the family grew again with the Birth of a daughter Clare. Eventually, Susan became stepmother to Carl’s daughter by his first marriage, Katy, who had been born in 1955. Katy visited often and in 1970 came to live with them. Susan embraced Katy as her own daughter and often took her into her studio. Katy recalled watching her paint; “I remember the smell of turpentine. That was the smell of her studio. It was a wonderful aroma”.

In addition to caring for children and animals, during the late fifties and early sixties, Susan had a full career in public art. She worked on mural projects for Millard Sheets’s design firm, whose major client was Howard Ahmanson. Beginning in 1954, Sheets designed a series of buildings for Home Savings Bank, and the first project was for the Ahmanson Bank and Trust Company on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Sheets hired both Susan and Paul Darrow to work on this project. By 1960 Sheets had built his own studio in Claremont, which included a room with a thirty-foot ceiling, where his design team created large-scale murals and decorative projects. The front building in Sheets’s studio was used for mural design, and in 1963 Sheets added another, larger room in the back to focus on mosaic designs. Sheets also expanded his business to include architectural design. Not an architect himself, Sheets formed a partnership with architect David Underwood, who eventually married Martha Menke. Sheets and Underwood designed buildings as well as their decorative schemes for Home Savings Banks throughout Los Angeles. Among their major projects were large scale murals for the Scottish Rite Masonic Temples in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Detroit Public Library, and the library of the University of Notre Dame.

The process of producing a mural was lengthy. Typically, Sheets would consult with the client, then would sketch ideas for a mural. Susan would do historical research on the mural’s theme, enlarge the design to a full-scale painting on paper, and translate it into its final form. In the mid1950s, she worked on commissions for Sheets with another Scripps alumna, artist Helen Watson. In 1959, as business expanded and Sheets secured commissions outside California, another Scripps graduate, Martha Menke (later Underwood), joined the firm to work on mosaic murals, including one for the Ahmanson Building on Wilshire and another at the Dallas Mercantile Bank. In the early 1960s, Susan took on more responsibility for designing murals when Sheets became director of the art program at Otis. In addition to preparing cartoons for painted murals, Susan also made several designs for large stained-glass panels for the Home Savings of America buildings. In addition, she painted four large murals on walnut panel in the Biological Sciences Library at Mt. San Antonio College. After the birth of Clare, however, Susan’s added responsibilities as a mother made it necessary to expand the design staff. In 1960 Denis O’Connor, who had received his artistic training at the Royal College of Art, London, joined the group. From 1960 to 1962 he worked with Martha Menke Underwood on several large mosaic projects, including a Home Savings Building in Anaheim and the Scottish Rite Temple. By 1963 O’Connor ran the mosaic crews who worked on exterior murals for Home Savings Banks, which were the major part of Sheets’s growing commissions from Howard Ahmanson. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, other assistants were Scripps alumnae Perry Jamieson, Andrc Mendenhall Mahoney, and Emily Symington, and Pomona alumna Nancy Colbath. From 1974, the staff included another Scripps alumna, Susan Lindley, as well as Alba Cisneros and Brian Worley, who worked for Denis O’Connor Mosaics.

Throughout the 1970s, Susan collaborated with Sheets on mural designs, but as he became less involved, she made more of the designs herself. Between 1963 and 1982, when Sheets retired, Hertel and O’Connor produced approximately eighty mosaic murals in association with Millard Sheets Designs, Inc. for Home Savings of America branches in California, including those in Downey, Encino, Fresno, Hemet, Hollywood, Long Beach, Palos Verdes, Redlands, Riverside, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Diego, and San Francisco. After 1983 the bank expanded nationally and commissioned Hertel and O’Connor to create more murals for Home Savings of America in California, including Coronado, Northridge, Chula Vista, San Carlos, Santa Monica, and LaCanada. For these murals, Susan often began her design with a small gouache painting. In addition, Hertel and O’Connor completed other mosaics for Home Savings of America throughout the United States, in Florida, lllinois, Ohio, Missouri, and Texas. After Sheets retired, Susan’s mosaic designs produced by Denis O’Connor Mosaics, reflected her own vision.

In 1990, Susan left mural work to concentrate on her own painting. Over a period of thirty years, Susan developed a particular method of creating mosaic murals. In the early years, she enlarged an initial sketch by hand to produce a full-scale drawing, a process seen in these 1959 views of her working on full-size cartoons for mosaic and stained-glass murals. Later, she shortened this time consuming step, by projecting a slide of the sketch onto the studio wall. Martha Underwood recalled that Susan had great powers of concentration and she was a solitary worker, whose most constant companion in the studio was her black standard poodle named Beastley. O’Connor also remembered that Hertel was a perfectionist; for example, she would spend a month refining her full-scale drawing, which her assistants would then trace in reverse onto heavy brown paper After the assistants divided the mosaic design into color sections, she would make a sample of color tessarae for each area. Then the assistants would fill in glass tiles for each section, glue them onto the paper, and fit the sections together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Sheets would check the design, but he gave Susan, and later her assistants, leeway in selecting the colors. Over a period of three or four months, the team would cut and set the glass pieces onto the paper. Occasionally, they added travertine marble to give the work a sculptural quality. O’Connor noted that although the mosaic was an extension of the original design, the medium’s particular qualities determined the final visual result. For example, the use of small modules of color gave the composition an impressionist quality, and the reflective glass pieces made light an important factor in the design. O’Connor recalled a dictum that Sheets told all his assistants, “The design is never finished until the mosaic is completed.”

Finally, the design team used an “indirect method” of applying mosaic to the wall. On the exterior of a building, an insert, usually one-and one-half-inch deep, was made into a marble wall. A master tile setter prepared the indentation with mortar to level the surface; then he added a thin film of grout and began applying separate sections of mosaic, -which were also backed with grout. He worked from the bottom of the design up, progressing in horizontal layers, in order to minimize any gravitational slide. He then beat in the sections with a marble block, soaked the paper, peeled it off, and removed the water-soluble glue. The installation of a mural could take a week to complete.

During the early sixties, Susan’s life was full, at work with mural projects and at home with children. In 1964 she gave birth to twins, Joshua and Paula. Although she had little time to herself, she painted in her studio at night, from ten until one or two in the morning. She had an intercom and listened for the sound of children waking. When the children grew older, Susan brought them into the studio, which Katy recalled was a big, beautiful rock-and-wood structure with a piano. We all played on the piano. There she gave her children art materials and introduced them to music. Clare recalled that her mother often used to sing folk songs with them. Susan preferred to be alone, however, when she painted. For two weeks each summer Carl would take the children on a vacation, which gave her time to paint.

Eventually, she produced a body of work that was shown in one-person exhibitions in Los Angeles; at Comara Gallery in 1962 and 1964 and at Westwood Gallery in 1963. Her work garnered some critical attention, including a positive review by Los Angeles Times art writer Henry Seldis. Subsequently, she was offered solo museum exhibitions at the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1967 and at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1969.

From the beginning of her career, Susan tried to keep her own painting separate from her work as a muralist. Although like her murals, her private painting was spatially flat, it differed stylistically from her public projects. In the mural commissions, she had to match color to outline, but in her own paintings she often left space between these elements so the canvas between them was visible. Moreover, whereas her mural painting tended toward opaque painted surfaces, her own work displayed transparent surfaces. Inspired by Henri Matisse, she applied paint thinly so that in places the color and texture of the canvas were tangible. Both McFee and Sheets suggested that she create thicker surfaces, but she resisted their advice. In 1986, she said, “I like a certain transparency of paint. I don’t want it [the painting] to appear labored, even if it was. Figuration dominates in her mural designs, but her paintings revealed her fundamental interest in animals. For example, in Eleven Am., Hollywood Park, c. 1965, a horse is the central character in the composition, while riders and walkers are merely peripheral elements. In Yin and Puppies, the focus is entirely on the Labrador and her litter. In this picture, the only allusions to humans are in headlines on the newspapers, which make a bed for the large brown mass of dogs. Morgan recalled that Yin used to steal avocados and feed them to her puppies; consequently, they all had shiny coats, a characteristic revealed by Susan’s technique of applying paint thinly and allowing the canvas to show through the space between shapes and their contour lines.

During the 1960s Susan developed a method of working from photographs that she employed throughout her career. She often took snapshots of her family and animals, which became point’s departure for gouache sketches. Although her own painting was stylistically different from her public murals, her personal work shared a method of gradual development from idea to finished painting. A seizable number of her works are gouache sketches, some of which were studies for larger paintings and others were independent works. Often final paintings would be the product of a composite of gouache sketches, each of which in turn fused several photographs. The gouache sketch provided her with a laboratory for her paintings, in which she could work out her ideas. Nevertheless, these gouaches also stand on their own as completed paintings.

Sam, who was a Labrador mix, is the focus of Goodbye to Sam, c. 1973, which shows the dog from the rear, running away along a hedge of roses. This picture captures the wandering spirit of Sam, who would disappear for weeks. Katy recalled that once, after Sam had been gone for a long time, she and Susan saw him in a parking lot. Katy called, “Sam,” while another family called, “Bart.” Then Katy realized that Sam led a double life; he also lived with the other family who had a female dog. During this time Susan also made dogs important characters in other works. For example, in Mantle with Santos and Pomegranates No. 1, c. 1974, a German shepherd named Leah looks up at a female figure, possibly the artist. Leah is also seen in Untitled (Cats on the Sink), c. 1975 standing next to Carl’s cattle dog named Dingo. This canine pair reappears in Untitled (Sleeping Dogs), c. 1979, in which their contours echo the curving branches of the patterned bedspread. Leah and Dingo are seen together again in Untitled (Woman in an Israeli Dress), c. 1979. In all of these pictures, the artist is as interested in the animals as she is in people; indeed, the human figures are often generalized composites of herself and her daughters, whereas the dogs are specific portraits.

In her works of the 1970s, Susan increasingly tilted space toward the picture plane. This Cczannesque technique allowed her to merge both frontal and overhead points of view. The spatial tilt becomes so steep in Untitled (Sleeping Dogs) that the bedspread becomes a vertical plane continuous with the wall and landscape beyond. This more radical spatial ambiguity and assertive patterning recalls Matisse’s large painting entitled Harmony in Red (1908, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg), in which wall and table are united through arabesque lines. Susan’s subject, like Matisse’s, was a dialogue between exterior and interior views of nature, as seen through the window and as reflected in decoration. Life at Barking Dogs Ranch flowed in and out of the buildings, a quality she evoked by melding indoors and outdoors in her painting. Whereas many of her works are either still life or landscape, Untitled (Sleeping Dogs) combines the two genres. What unites her work is the connective visual thread of pattern. These paintings also reveal the artist’s interest in decorative arts of other cultures, especially Navajo rugs, East Indian spreads, and southwestern Santos and pottery. Her interest in these arts reflects the general attention paid in the sixties and early seventies to tribal and folk art, but her paintings include the specific objects that she collected which, like her children and animals, became integral components in her works. Her fascination with other cultures is also seen in her interest in Kundalini Yoga, which she studied with Yogi Bhajan and taught for more than twelve years at Pitzer College. Her devotion to yoga was part of her spiritual view of the world, which was reflected in both her daily ritual and the fundamentally meditative mood of her art.

One of the major themes of her work, which emerged in the seventies and continued into the eighties, is sleep. In some works, such as (Untitled) Sleeping Dogs, and Cats and Kittens, 1986, animals nap, while in others, such as Saying Goodnight, c. 1979 her children prepare for sleep. This work pictures Susan soothing her daughter at bedtime. She would often sing to her children to help them relax as they were falling asleep or rub their backs and bring them hot chocolate to help them wake up. In these pictures, the bed is the site not just of sleeping but also of dreaming. She evokes this nexus of physical rest and imaginary flight through pattern, which surrounds the sleepers, whether they are animals or humans. In Sleeping Dogs pattern envelops the animals, but there is also a view outdoors; while in Cats and Boots, 1986 pattern fills the entire field of vision, suggesting that the bed is a refuge from the outside world. In Unmade Bed, c. 1985 the artist puts the bed against an open window and makes the folds of patterned pillows and sheets look like floating cumulus clouds. Susan thought of unmade beds in terms of landscape: “I love unmade beds, they remind me of the sea.” In this work, in which the sleeper is not present but implied, the worlds of waking and dreaming coalesce. Occasionally ideas for paintings occurred to her while relaxing-indeed, she titled one painting of herself lying in bed, Artist Not Working, 1986, but she did most of her work at a large table in the studio.

By the mid-1970s, when the children were teenagers, Susan had more time for painting and for presenting her work to the public. She exhibited at Scripps College in 1974 and Gallery 8, in Claremont, in 1976 and 1978. With their children grown and feeling dissatisfied with the congestion of Southern California, Carl and Susan decided to move to New Mexico, which they had visited several times. She sold many paintings before she left Claremont and inaugurated a relationship with Ankrum Gallery, in Los Angeles, which presented a one-person exhibition in 1981 and continued to show her work for the next six years. Most of her menagerie, including her white horse named Saro, joined the exodus from Southern California. This horse is the subject of White Horse, Pink Arroyo, c. 1980, a picture painted soon after she moved to Cerrillos. This work indicates that the change in her environment subtly affected her painterly vision. In 1986 she recalled, “I’ve lost a certain California ease and lyricism. My surroundings are simpler; everything is sure.” Whereas her California landscapes were lyrical, her New Mexican ones were austere, reflecting the harsh beauty of the desert. Outside the small community of Cerrillos, she and Carl lived in an adobe house with passive solar heat and built corrals for their horses.

Soon after settling in Cerrillos, however, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and returned briefly to Los Angeles for treatment. During this difficult period, she included images of herself in such interior views as Blue Tennis Shoe and Self Portrait of 1981, but she later claimed that self-portraiture had not been her goal: “I’m not trying to do self-portraits: it’s just that I’m the only one person around; it’s autobiography.” It is not surprising that, at this turning point in her life, having uprooted herself from her community and confronting a serious disease, she focused on herself. In both paintings she conveyed her meditative state through patterns near her head, motifs suggesting that nature and art were her solace. Although she is seated indoors, she connects herself with nature indirectly through ornament. For example, in Blue Tennis Shoe her head is next to the floral pattern of an East Indian spread, and in Self-Portrait, she sits next to an American Indian retablo adorned with flower and leaf motifs. Even in these interior scenes, she seems to be dreaming of nature through art, which must have had soothing powers during this dark period. In both of these works, she also used color to give the pictures a certain mood. Although the neutral clothes of the figure suggest outward calm, the bright red of the chair exudes an underlying energy. Thus, through color she projects her conflicted feelings of depression and hope.

The artist’s sense of uncertainty was intensified by divorce from her husband Carl. Despite the upheaval, however, Susan began a new life again. In 1987, after their separation, she built her own adobe home, studio, and corrals farther out … the desert, approximately two miles from Cerrillos. To design her house she worked with Bill Gilbert, an artist she had met in 1968 in Claremont when he was a student at Pitzer, and who had moved to Cerrillos with his wife, another Pitzer alumna, Ann Nelson. In 1987 she said of her new life in New Mexico: “I feel at home here. I love the spaciousness, the red dirt the mix of cultures, and the atmosphere of healing.” Once settled in her own house, Susan immersed herself in painting and writing poetry and continued showing her work at Elaine Horwitch Gallery, first in Santa Fe, then later in Sedona, and Scottsdale, Arizona. She had annual exhibitions at Elaine Horwitch Gallery from 1983 until 1993. During this decade, many private collectors, including celebrities Dyan Cannon, Gene Hackman, and Robert Redford, acquired her work.

While Hertel lived in Cerrillos, her interest in the culture of the Southwest deepened. She enjoyed singing folk songs with her rancher neighbor Archie West and immersed herself in Native American religion and art. She became a Robbie Miller close friend of Rina Swentzell and her family, who lived at nearby Santa Clara Pueblo, and attended ceremonial dances during fiestas there. Hertel became involved in not only the culture but also the environment of the Southwest. In 1990 she participated in citizens committees, “Save the Ortiz Mountains” and “Friends of Santa Fe County,” organizations formed to protect the natural beauty of the Ortiz mountains from large scale gold mining, which they believed used chemical processes harmful to the desert’s ecology. In New Mexico, as in California, Hertel’s life was full of painting, music, yoga, social and environmental activism. She wove together her art and life, which she saw in spiritual terms as unified.

Beginning in 1984 and continuing for the next seven years, Susan enjoyed the most productive time in her artistic career. She made large paintings in which color expressed a sense of exuberance and joy. In works such as Untitled (Dogs Eating), c. 1986 she took a cue from Matisse’s Red Studio, 1911 and filled the entire field with a brilliant red ground, fusing frontal and overhead views and eliminating any dividing line between wall and floor. Unlike Matisse, however, the space of Hertel’s picture is all floor. The overall red, which unifies the space, also creates a sense of emotional wholeness and optimism, feelings that reflect her hopes for her new life. Red is a pervasive color in her works; in some paintings it is the dominant color chord and in others it is a powerful counter note to an otherwise subdued palette. In all cases, however, the color is integrally bound with forms. In 1986 she said, “If the shapes and juxtapositions are right, the color happens almost by itself. When a painting is good, my body feels a sense of wholeness and harmony.”

During the early 1980s, the theme of animals, which had always been in her work, became even more central to her art. In interior views, her dogs are special companions. For example, Leah is the guardian for the woman who reads in Woman in Golden Room, c. 1983. Reiki, a dog whose name was inspired by a Japanese/American technique of energy healing, which Hertel herself practiced, is her companion in Dreams, c. 1987. In Dreams, Reiki keeps a silent vigil; indeed, he seems to be a protector in the surrounding darkness. Dreams and another work, Exciting Night, 1985, belong to a group of paintings from the mid-eighties that show a woman reclining on a bed against a wall. The figure is turned away so the viewer cannot see whether the woman is asleep or awake. Is she sleeping or unable to sleep as the lightning strikes in the desert sky outside her window? These back views intensify the figure’s solitude, and the dark and stormy window view is a dramatic backdrop. Hertel enjoyed watching lightning storms which roll across the desert in the late summer and illuminate the night sky. Indeed, the night was also her favorite time to paint. These storm paintings evoke both the power Of nature and Susan’s connection with its mystery through her art. In contrast to these interior scenes, in which dogs are guardians, in outdoor views, such as Untitled (Woman with Horse and Dog), c. 1980 or For Sale with Moon, c. 1984-85, the horse is the animal companion. Here also female figures are lost in thought; they look down or off into the distance at something the viewer cannot see. Yet the animals seem to intuit her mood and gaze in the same direction.

After chemotherapy treatment, her cancer went into remission and she returned to painting with renewed energy. Many of the works of the mid-1980s focused on the life of the animals on her ranch. For example, the painting Cat and Kittens, 1986 features her cat Yoko and her litter asleep on a counter, arranged amid her letters and glasses. During this period, she created more multi-panel works, which showed animals without human companions. In both the diptych Cat and Kittens and the triptych Cows in Galisteo, c. 1987, Susan arranged the animals shapes against a flattened backdrop and, in effect, treated them like objects in a still life. In such works as Conversation, c. 1988, Susan also imbued people with the stillness of inanimate objects, in effect transforming them into still life. She examined the silhouettes of the two seated women with the same red in the chair slats. She also created multiple-panel landscapes, as in Blizzard, c. 1988, in which she also arranged the rocks and brush on the snowy ground like objects on a table. In all of these works she poetically interpreted still life as the still moment at the center of life.

From 1987 to 1989, night emerged as an important theme in her work. In several works, such as Untitled, (Horses, Night Sky), c. 1987, Summer Night, 1988, and Night Ride, 1989, night riding was her subject. From her childhood, her habit was to ride her horses during the afternoon; now, living on her ranch in Cerrillos, she also occasionally rode at night when the moon was full, which offered a different experience of the desert landscape.

During the late 1980s, horses become an increasing presence in her paintings and poems. Their images suggest that riding horses filled her emotional needs-offering a sense of refuge from worry and a feeling of unity with nature-themes that appear in both her poetry and her painting. In the late 1960s, while living in Glendora, she wrote the poem Horse and Rider-Both, in which she alluded to riding as a means of relaxation:

At the wordless edges of a noisy life,
the horses waited for the woman to come home.
They took her tired, ragged soul
and smoothed it round as a dappled hip.

The sensation of merging with nature through the experience of horseback riding is a recurring theme in her poetry, which she expressed in the Company of Animals:

Taking the mare, we ride out-asymmetrical;
the dogs define and redefine our shape.
Convex against concave, we fit each other;
earth and sky-a wholeness without a crack.

In another early poem, Yin, she evoked images of becoming one with the night that enveloped her as she rode:

I feel the edges where my body meets the horse.
Except for that, we are embraced by murmuring formlessness. Gravity lessens, and becomes like ocean tides and river currents And we are barely singular and almost wholly one
nearly past the edge of mind that dreamed of knowing it

Looming golden-red and fully round, the shocking moon precipitates what was dissolved in dark into illuminated form.

The moon, which has a magical quality in this poem, also has a mysterious aura in her painting Horses, Night Sky. Indeed, she often returned to images in her early poems in her later paintings. In works of the late 1980s, Susan finds formal affinities between the shapes of her horses and the contours of the Cerrillos landscape, an idea that infuses the composition of her pictures. For instance, in Untitled (Horses, Night Sky), c. 1987, the lines of the horses shoulders echo those in the distant hills. In Untitled (Horses, Mountains, and Sky), c. 1988, she merges the horizon line with the contour of the horse’s neck. This rhyming of body and landscape is also something she experienced while riding her horse. As she wrote in A Feeling in the Bones:

Once I looked over my hill-colored shoulder at the shoulder shaped hill and, for an instant, forgot where one stopped being the other.

The sense of wordless communication with animals, which is evident in her paintings, she also expressed in the poem In the Company of Animals:

The animals are twos and threes, and I am one.
We form a federation with no common tongue.
At feeding time we brush against each other,
mixing the clouds the cold makes from our breath.

Between 1988 and 1992 there was a shift in the vantage point of her paintings, reflecting a new approach to painting the horse. She wanted to avoid conventional views; as she recalled, “I try to keep away from ‘horse’ pictures and the usual way of looking at horses.” Consequently, she created dramatically cropped views of horses bodies, usually truncating or excluding their heads. “Heads are not the focus,” she said, “…they stop the eye. I want that rhythm that happens from shape to shape to be…flowing.” What she created were landscapes from horses bodies, in which she found abstract rhythms of line and shape. “I really love the shapes they make, singly and juxtaposed together in a combination of shapes.”

Her pictures began to convey her vantage point of the animals as she experienced them while feeding and grooming them. For example, in My Old Horse as a Cloud, 1991, she looks not over the horse but directly at the level of the back. In other works, Dark Horse, White Mare in the Snow, c. 1991, her viewpoint is so low and close that she sees under a horse who is only inches away. These views would have been what she saw while brushing or saddling her horse; however, these paintings also embody the perspective of another horse. Indeed, in these late works one can see an identification between the artist’s and the horse’s point of view. Unlike Franz Marc, the twentieth-century German expressionist painter who conveyed a sense of the animal’s emotions through color, Susan embodied the horse’s vantage point in her spatial structure.

Her increasing identification in her painting with the experience of animals coincided with her realization in 1991 that the cancer, which had been in remission, had returned in her lungs. This time, however, she eschewed chemotherapy for holistic healing. Although at times she felt her energy waning, she kept painting and produced some of her most emotionally powerful works. In 1991 she created a group of outdoor scenes, as in Black Horse, White Horse, Wheelbarrow, that employed the technique of overall color background that she had used in 1986 in Untitled (Dogs Eaang). As in this earlier picture, she uses a single color to unify the pictorial space, but here it is a golden brown synonymous with dusty soil. As in her previous corral pictures, she assumes a perspective that could belong to either the artist or to a horse; but here, more radically than before, she pushes the animals to the periphery of the picture, cutting them off so only fragments of their bodies remain. She focused on a small yellow wheelbarrow, sitting empty in the middle of the corral, which she invested with a sense of great significance. This simple implement seems to symbolize the tranquility she found in the daily tasks of feeding and caring for her animals. In the midst of mundane work she felt connected with the world, as she described in 1987: “I have found everything I might go looking for somewhere else is usually right here if I just pay attention.” As early as 1965 she had written in the poem Prayer:

Tonight it rains and imperiously blows.
The children go to bed mild eyed with love.
And then it’s time to feed
the goats and horses; theirs are simple needs.
The horses come, moonlike
Huge and quiet is the peace and wholeness here.

Along with the goodness of life, the presence of death is a recurring theme in her art, especially her poetry. Susan expressed her grief when her animals died; for example , in 1989 she wrote a poem for the dog Reiki, Who appeared in a photographic portrait of the artist as well as the paintings Dreams and Woman in Golden Room.

Oh, Reiki, bear dog, tiger dog,
with amber eyes, your pink tongue flying-
how vivid! Silver brindled, black,
with your joking tail and bright red collar,
running, running when I rode
and your big bear head between my hands,
in quieter times, ears sweetly flat…

This afternoon I ride alone
A little snow comes down
to dampen my vagrant sparks.
The wind blows, and coyotes bark.
My heart hurts like a dog’s paw
burned on ice.

She also found communion with nature in the presence of her animals, and this sense of connection runs throughout her poems and paintings. Yet the two bodies of work are distinct in their primary focus. While her paintings exclude stillness, her poems embody movement. Riding is the point of departure for many poems that express the physical and emotional sensations of moving through the landscape on her horse with dogs in tow. In these works all her senses are heightened to experience the fullness of the moment. Finally, it was in nature that Hertel experienced the divine; for her, god was present in the humblest animal, a thought she expressed in her poem The Bodies of the Animals:

….lnner hollow
Fill with truth
In silence
Come
the animals
Their bodies
Wise and anywhere
I touch them
There is God.

In 1991-92, as cancer spread to her lungs and her strength ebbed, Susan kept her life full of art, family, and friends. She created her last works, which were ambitious in scale and innovative in composition. Several presented wide-angle views of horses, seen again from an extremely close vantage point. The settings for these pictures were the spaces in which her animals lived. For example, in Horses with Light Shining Through Door, 1991, two horses stand in a barn and a thin ray of light breaks between huge red doors to illuminate a black floor. As in earlier pictures, the expanse of red energizes the pictorial space, although here it is countered by the dark ground. Both her dark Peruvian Paso named Santo and her white horse Saro are radically cropped so that only portions of their massive torsos and necks fill the picture. Although the horse’s bodies read as abstract shapes, they have an almost palpable physicality. In Blizzard, c. 1991-92 she again shows the two horses from unusual viewpoints, cropped and seen from the rear. Indeed, the black horse on the left, Santo, is a single mass of tail, haunches, and barely visible head. The white horse at the right, Saro, seems to blend with the snow that covers the scene. The snow suggests the power of nature that encompasses life and death; in fact, when Susan painted this picture, Saro was dying of cancer. Ultimately, however, the snow’s pattern embodies the peace that she found with her animals, a peace that she experienced in nature, where she felt the presence of God.

During the last months of 1992, although her breast cancer made her weak, she continued to find joy in painting and riding. Indeed, she rode her horse within two weeks of her death. Days before she died, her daughter Clare brought Santo, her favorite horse, into her bedroom so that she could say goodbye to him. At dawn on March 10, 1993, with Clare and Paula at her side, Susan died in her sleep at her home outside Cerrillos. She was a woman of deep spirituality and love, who had expressed these feelings in her daily relationships with her family and friends. It was in her art, however, that she gave form to her profound empathy with animals, a sense of identification that she first felt as a child and which lasted a lifetime. Not only her paintings but also her poems carried this theme; and one of her poems, titled Immigrant, said it most poignantly:

I am a dog person, a horse person,
a hawk person, a hill person
But I am not a person of the people tribe.

I am an immigrant among the animals.
We communicate imperfectly. Still, I am welcome.
I know the language of the people tribe.
It hurts.
I know the customs and the ways
But I have become an exile.

I will live as a foreigner
among the animals. Maybe God will find me there.

This “immigrant among the animals” created paintings and poems that powerfully communicate the richness of living in the routine of life. “My ideal in painting, she said, is that moment when what’s everyday is seen as magical.” In her art we find the poetry in the prosaic stuff of life.

Susan Hertel formed her art in the decades preceding the women’s movement, so she did not have the benefit of a feminist critical discourse to support her interest in the traditionally “feminine” subject of the family. She forged her career in a more solitary way and was not part of a critically recognized community of women artists. Never the less, she was one of the few women in the traditionally male world of art in the 1950s and 1960s who made a career in painting, and was remarkable for having done so while also rearing five children and having a twenty-year career as a muralist. Her husband Carl recalls that, in the 1970s, she was sympathetic with the women’s movement and, in the 1980s, approved of the efforts of the activist Guerrilla Girls to expose the disparity of representation between male and female artists in museums and galleries. Throughout the years, however, she remained an independent artistic voice. In the 1950s, when abstract expressionism jettisoned recognizable subject matter, she stayed committed to realism. In the 1960s, when pop art eschewed the artist’s touch, she left the marks of her hand and brush on the canvas. In the 1970s, when conceptual art rejected painting, she still preferred oil on canvas. Although she persisted as a realist painter, her goal was never to merely document what she saw but always to convey the sense of what was extraordinary in the ordinariness of life. The source of her prodigious energy was her spiritual approach to life and art.

Art for Sue was part and parcel of her spiritual journey. Indeed, she found within each of her daily projects-whether it was painting, writing poetry, riding, or feeding her animals-profound joy in the experience of living and a deep connection with the universe of living things. -Carl Hertel