Finding Susan Andrews in a gallery of trees

Salmon and landscape provide the basis for an installation that includes watercolor paintings and two additional large multimedia pieces. In “Beauty of Decay: a Catalyst for Growth,” fish lithographs hang from a stick as if drying. “Cleared, Cut, & Woven,” offers birch trees made from prints and hung from the ceiling. “The show is not so much about just the salmon,” she said. “It’s about everything that’s going on, and the cascade of information, how that affected me personally.”

Andrews’ journey into the UAF art department began in the Deep South, where she was born. She spent her childhood in Alabama and Mississippi, encouraged by her painter mom to explore art, while her interest in the outdoors is rooted in her father’s career as a plant pathologist. She was drawn to the woods, which she described as “my sanctuary,” and was especially enthralled by waterfalls.

Andrews married soon after high school and moved with her then-husband to Colorado Springs, where he worked as a police officer. She found employment airbrushing t-shirts while teaching herself screen printing and other skills. “I landed a job with no experience, no formal education, working as a graphic designer, doing everything by hand like they used to,” she said.

As her kids grew up she gravitated into the mortgage field where, one day in 2015, she had an epiphany. “I was like, what am I doing? I hate my job. Something’s missing in my life,” she recalled. With her kids long since launched, she began taking community college classes.

“I had been missing art,” she said. “I had been missing community and artist community. And I fell in love with the academics.” She worked on an associate’s degree, then headed to Adams State University in Alamosa, Colorado, for her BFA. Even before graduating, she decided, “I’m not stopping at the bachelor’s, I’m going to the terminal degree. Get the MFA.” This brought her to Fairbanks and UAF, where she arrived in August of 2020, at the peak of the pandemic.

Andrews said that as she flew into Fairbanks that late summer evening with the sun still up, she found the landscape out her window “absolutely stunning.” While the pandemic raged and limited what she could do in her newly adopted town, she started exploring the world around her and began attending the truncated classes brought by coronavirus restrictions. Class sizes were small, she said, and people were hesitant to spend too much time together getting to know each other. “I don’t think anybody realized how that affected us, but it really did.”

Andrews said students were still recovering from the confusion of the pandemic and struggling to regain focus when Sasha Bitzer, an assistant professor of printmaking and painting, joined the faculty. Bitzer “really started challenging all of us,” Andrews said, “and it was exactly what we all needed.”

Andrews said Bitzer’s guidance helped her focus on the public expression of what is a personal artistic journey for her. “I tend to disconnect myself and not really think about the real reason why I do what I do and why I’ve done this. And it was her relentless questioning that made me think of why.” Bitzer’s inquiries and critiques “made me think deeper and made me realize the show’s cascading effect is about my experience,” Andrews said. “Learning about the things. Learning about Alaska.”

Andrews’ MFA work found her moving from the realist watercolor paintings she had previously devoted her time to, and into abstraction. “I started asking questions the best that I could, investigating patterns and textures and things that I saw. I started going into all the colors and patterns that I saw, all the textures. And working with an alternative process of photography, I began to discover a way of extracting those things that I was seeing and looking closely at nature. Everything was so abstract and so beautiful and intricate. So I began to paint that.”

Both realism and abstraction are found in “Scale of the Fall,” and there is also a significant amount of research behind all of the pieces. She studied local microclimates and the ways Alaskans interact with their world, finding that, “the salmon are so crucial. They’re like a key to the Alaskan lifestyle.” She credited experts including Thomas Paragi, a wildlife biologist with the Department of Fish and Game, and Peter Westley, an associate professor of fisheries, for providing knowledge critical to the finished works. “I began to abstract what I was seeing and allow the shapes and forms and patterns to dictate where I put the color. It became a cascade of information.”

Andrews said she’s found her place and plans on remaining in Alaska after graduating, hoping to teach and pursue other opportunities. “I finally said, okay, this is good, because you’re getting ready to graduate, and it needs to be home. If you’re going to do work, if you’re going to do work about Alaska, this better be your freaking home.”

“The Cascade Effect” by Susan Andrews will remain on Display through March 22 at the University Art Gallery, Room 313 in the Fine Arts Complex. She will give her MFA thesis presentation as a public talk at 1 p.m March 22 in the BP Design Theater, Room 401 in the Engineering Building. She can be found online at www.brighteyesartstudios.com/#featured-work.