Article by Lynda La Rocca
Artists – August 2004 – Colorado Central Magazin
BRIGHT, BOLD, AND BIGGER-THAN-LIFE: These are the words that immediately come to mind when viewing the works of Leadville artist Susie Allen.
From vibrant oils and acrylics to pencil drawings glowing with unexpected flashes of color, Allen celebrates form and figure in both realistic and fanciful ways.
“The human body, male and female, is so beautiful and graceful,” Allen explains. “I’ve always been fascinated by the way people move, an expression on a person’s face, the look in someone’s eyes. And this started when I was a little kid. Even in grade school, I’d be at the lunch table and I’d just start drawing the girl sitting next to me.”
That fascination has led Allen to specialize in portraits. And not just any portraits. Allen’s oversized oil paintings capture professional hardrock miners working underground or participating in mine-drilling competitions held each summer in various Colorado mountain communities. Anyone who has watched Leadville’s mining contests during the August Boom Days celebration will immediately recognize veteran competitors like Rich Tedesco and Grady Colby. Allen has captured both on canvas as they pound hand steels into solid granite or wrestle a 130-pound jackleg drill to the face of a 20-ton boulder.
“I’m amazed by the camaraderie at these events,” Allen muses. “The competition is stiff, but you can always sense the miners’ mutual friendship and respect and their passion for what they do.”
That same kind of passion is evident in Allen’s life and work. After receiving a degree in performing arts from Rhode Island’s Roger Williams University, Allen immersed herself in her other great love, acting. She has appeared in community-theater productions in Vail, Leadville, and her home state of Nebraska, but is perhaps best-known locally for her five-year stint performing in original, old-time melodramas with Leadville’s Crystal Comedy Company. Acting even brought Allen, 42, and her husband Mark together. They met at a London theater when she was completing her degree requirements and Mark, who is originally from England, was a police officer guarding the stage door.
“My greatest problem had always been that it was easy to lose faith in myself,” Allen says. “But onstage, I found my confidence. So acting became the catalyst for my artwork. And because acting is larger-than-life, my paintings also grew bigger and larger-than-life. But I have to admit,” she adds, smiling mischievously, “that I also like to work large because I’ve always believed that if a little is good, a lot is much, much better!”
ALLEN IS CONSTANTLY coming up with ideas for new art, even when she’s trying to get some rest. “They smack me in the head in the middle of the night,” she exclaims. “Sometimes I’m literally sleepwalking because I’m so full of ideas.”
Some of those images have overflowed onto Allen’s biggest “canvas” — the cozy Victorian home she shares with Mark and their two children, Annabelle, 15, and Nicholas, 12. Bright blue interior walls hung with fishnets and seashells perfectly complement Allen’s oversized acrylics — painted directly onto wall surfaces — of underwater “gardens” inhabited by green sea turtles, orange fish, and purple anemones.
A pale-yellow kitchen wall is adorned with a delightfully whimsical reproduction of a 19th-century advertisement for a device called “The Universal Food Chopper.” Animal-rights activists might want to skip this section: Among the creatures merrily plunging into the contraption are fat pink pigs, white lambs, mollusks reminiscent of the oysters gobbled by the Walrus and the Carpenter in Lewis Carroll’s famous poem, a plethora of lustrous, leggy fruits and vegetables, and a fish that family friends call the “trod.”
“That’s because it was originally a cod, but I made it into a trout,” Allen grins.
The walls of Nicholas’s bedroom are covered with depictions of cartoon characters and action figures from Winnie the Pooh to the Toy Story movie gang, while Annabelle’s room is dominated by a perfectly rendered mural of beloved female Disney characters filing out of a towering castle. Snow White is smallest and closest to the castle because, “Annabelle likes Snow White least, with her squeaky little voice,” Allen says. Mulan, Annabelle’s favorite because of her bravery and heroism, is the largest and farthest away.
“Here are all these women leaving the castle on their own, without a man,” Allen proclaims exuberantly. “What would Freud say about that?”
Husband Mark, an ultra-marathon runner and a sergeant with the Vail Police Department, probably wondered pretty much the same thing when he came home from a race one weekend to find two large, winged fairies perched among gigantic flowers painted on the wooden facade of their house.
“I can imagine what people thought,” Mark laughs. “Here I am, a police officer who runs ultra-marathons, yet I live in a pink house with fairies on the outside. It was torture.”
“The neighbors were asking me, ‘Does Mark know you’re doing this?'” his wife recalls, eyes twinkling. “I said, ‘If you see a tent in the yard, you’ll know how he reacted.'”
Allen, who also holds a degree in design from Colorado Mountain College, is an otherwise completely self-taught artist who learned by trial-and-error and by studying the work of such personal favorites as the English pre-Raphaelite painters Sir Frank Dicksee and John William Waterhouse and Italian Renaissance geniuses Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Another favorite is 17th-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the first women to achieve recognition in the male-dominated world of post-Renaissance art.
“I’ve always preferred to work with oils [oil paint]. That’s the medium I use for my miners’ portraits because it best captures the luminescence of the skin,” Allen explains. “Acrylics dry too fast and at first, I didn’t know how to blend them. But I wanted to use acrylics, too, so I taught myself how.
“And I just kept trying until I got it right,” she adds. “One thing about me is, I’m tenacious. And I’m a perfectionist to a fault.”
That penchant for perfectionism is evident in the framed pencil portraits of Allen’s in-laws and of Nick and Annabelle, which are hanging in the dining room. Primarily done with graphite and sepia-toned pencils, these portraits contain small but exquisite touches of color, here in a blooming flower, there in the blue of a subject’s eyes. Concealed somewhere within each work is Allen’s signature. “I don’t like those big, obvious names on art,” she says.
Allen’s already busy life — she has home-schooled both children for several years and will continue home-schooling Nicholas when Annabelle begins attending a private high school in Eagle County this fall — is about to get even busier. From August 5 through August 8, Leadville’s National Mining Hall of Fame & Museum will host a show of her artwork to coincide with Boom Days weekend. Then on August 11, this exhibition, sponsored by the Leadville Arts Coalition and called “Jewels of the Deep,” opens in the New Discovery Building of Colorado Mountain College’s Timberline Campus in Leadville, where it runs until September 11.
“The title of the show refers to the stunning minerals miners pull from within the earth,” Allen explains. “But I also chose it because of the miners’ eyes — the sparkling richness and depth that I see there.”
So what’s next? For Susie Allen, it’s more painting, more passion, more following her heart. “You have to do what drives you crazy and not care what others may think,” she declares — how else? — passionately. “I’m living my life for me and painting what I love. But that’s not a selfish thing because if you don’t pursue your passions and follow your heart, you’re robbing the world of your gifts. You’re not being who God created you to be.”
“Think how much the world would have missed if Michelangelo had decided to become a farmer,” she adds.
And Central Colorado would indeed be a poorer place without Allen’s prodigious talents and extraordinary works of art, which reflect both pride in our state’s mining heritage and her own special joie de vivre.
Lynda La Rocca visits Leadville often from her home and office in Twin Lakes.