'Diva' learned art from blind children

Hill painter/author a 'goddess to be worshipped'

By MARIE FOWLER

"I grew up at the foot of an easel," confesses artist, author and educator Susan Rodriguez. "I have been an artist my entire life. There was never a question about it. It's a genetic mutation," laughs the Chestnut Hill resident (since 1976), a third-generation painter. And if the dramatic, demonstrative Rodriguez weren't an artist, she would surely be an actress, a diva! From the silk fringe sweeping through the air at her wrists to the sparkling chandelier earrings that are constantly in motion, her very presence is performance art.

Rodriguez's current one-man show, Stealing Water from the Moon, is an intriguing selection of pastel collages, prints, scrolls and ceramics, on view at the Indigo Arts Gallery in Old City through October 31. The artist took the show's title from a "Zen saying about the quest for the unattainable - which I believe essential to the creation of one's art."

"I was born over a dress shop on Ogontz Avenue," Rodriguez says. "I went to a Quaker school, but I never knew what to put in the box where you check off your religion. Undecided? I was raised in a very Socialist family. When I paint, I am a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Russian Jew. I worship the gods of the volcano."

The first Dubrow painter was Rodriguez's grandfather, a Russian immigrant who was headed to Paris but wound up in Philadelphia. "He was a very I and the Village Chagall-esque  painter," Rodriguez recalls. But it was really her maternal aunt, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts-trained painter Elaine Dubrow who mentored Rodriguez.

Under Dubrow's wing, Rodriguez painted from her first nude model at the age of nine, a practice she has continued to this day. And in the excruciatingly honest way of children everywhere, she painted precisely what she saw. Hence, scars left from a row of sutures on the model's abdomen were meticulously reproduced on Rodriguez's composition. The model's disdain didn't escape the child's notice. Rodriguez remembers, "She doesn't' like my picture because I am telling the truth, I told my aunt. 'Don't worry,' Aunt Elaine told me and lit up another cigarette."

Rodriguez got her professional start working with blind and visually impaired children. "They taught me about art," she insists, "which is not about seeing in the mundane sense. It is about imagination, about coming with an open heart. Children live in a world of make-believe. When they make a picture, they have a story. It's very real to them. If you ask them what it is, they think you're nuts. It's a fire truck - can't you see that it's a fire truck?"

The Philadelphia public school system required a bit of tricky navigation. "The name Rodriguez does not mean I speak Spanish," the artist sighs, but "they assigned me first to a school with a large Puerto Rican population." After a time, the students got her to agree that "for as long as I am here, I will be a Puerto Rican. Bueno!" She went on to teach in the system for 30 years, most recently at the Overbrook Education Center.

Rodriguez's many, many honors include being named Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year in 1966. An outspoken and most effective advocate for multicultural and special needs arts education, she received both the Disney American Teacher in Visual Arts and the Milken Family Foundation Outstanding Educator Award in 1993-1994.

"Teaching," Rodriguez says wisely, "is the balancing of all things."

"Kids are interested not only in looking," Rodriguez explained, "but they also want to paint and sculpt - to do it!" Thus, recognizing the void in arts education for special needs students, Rodriguez wrote The Special Artist's Handbook: Art Activities and Adaptive Aids for Handicapped Students. She went on to publish Art Smart: Art History and Appreciation, Portfolio *, Portfolio II, as well as Culture Smart: Multicultural Appreciation through Art. (Note to readers: These books are not just for children. They excite an adult's creative urges as well.)

Currently, Rodriguez is an adjunct professor of art education at the University of the Arts, coordinating teacher development programs in conjunction with area museums.

She has lectured and presented workshops for most of the major museums, art centers and educational groups in the area, and as far afield as Washington, D.C., the University of Texas, the Grand Rapids Museum of Art, an Indiana Museum of American Indian and Western Art, Sacramento and even Germany. She speaks on topics ranging from classroom management for art teachers (no running with scissors) to adapting the art curriculum for special education students to myth, tradition and practical aspects of the arts of Asia, Africa and the Americas.

In early November, she'll offer a course for Bucks County Schools common inservice day on legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Rodriguez's own work is about the intimacy of the human experience, and she perfectly relates to Kahlo, citing muralist Diego Rivera's comment that Kahlo, his wife, "paints from the heart."

One expresses the hope Rodriguez married more successfully than Kahlo.

"Absolutely!" the artist says. "In the first place, my husband is better looking than Diego Rivera, and in the second place, he worships me. Women are goddesses and are to be worshipped. I married in a cross-cultural way," she explains, although she confesses to "feeling Latina," confiding that "in Spanish-speaking areas, people talk to me first and my husband gets annoyed." In truth, she admits, "I'm the Lucy to his Desi."

Rodriguez and her husband operate a travel business, offering study tours that follow in the footsteps of famous artist tours. One of their most popular tours features Vincent van Gogh. The couple's two grown children are a teacher and a businessman. The latter often reminds his mother she must sell her paintings.

Rodriguez works exclusively on paper and ceramic tile, eschewing canvas as a "Western" material. Her style is primarily figural. Many of her works are mounted as hanging scrolls. "I love ink," Rodriguez enthuses. "Ink dances. It takes courage to get it down and live with it. There was no correction fluid for the monks in monasteries."

A serious practitioner of yoga, Rodriguez brings the asanas (positions) to her compositions, her graceful line in perfect harmony. "As in yoga," she says, "you have to empty your mind to paint. I am not Asian, but I blend cultures." Indeed, in her work we find such wildly divergent images as the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Buddha and Lord Krishna.

Not all of Rodriguez's images are nude. Fearful of running afoul of postal regulations, she chose a clothed but evocative image for the postcard announcing her show. Rodriguez is so imaginative in her handling of textiles that perhaps she ought to do more of them. "Heartprint," a monotype, takes its cue from Japanese aesthetics, from the moon-viewing passengers in the boat to the shoji screen.

"I have had many honors in my life," Rodriguez says," and I have been blessed to receive my accolades while I am still healthy. My mother is in a nursing home, neurologically impaired after a bad fall, so not much gets through. But when I told her about this exhibition,  tears ran down her cheeks." The artist recalls her mother's words: "Susie, Susie, you're an artist. You are a Dubrow!"

"I just learned about tonalli," the painter remarks. "It's an Aztec term for the life forces that puddle in certain people. I hope my work has tonalli."

Rodriguez has a BFA and master's of education from Tyler Art School and an honorary doctorate of fine arts from Moore College of Art. When asked her age, she replied, "The French have a saying: a woman who will reveal her age cannot be trusted with anything. So let's just say I've reached a certain level of enlightenment."

Visiting the Indigo Arts Gallery, at 151 N. 3rd St., between Race and Arch, is rather like a trip along the Silk Road, a pleasure cruise in Caribbean waters or a safari through the jungles of Africa. Principally showcasing ethnographic, folk and contemporary arts from Asia, Africa and the Americas, Indigo Arts may be reached by telephone at 215-922-4041 or at www.indigoarts.com. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. until 6:30 p.m. and Sunday from noon until 6 p.m.