THE ARTISTs BEHIND THE ART

Summerville’s Royal Artist

Summerville portraitist Suzanne Royal lives in a one hundred year old house, and paints in another little house out back with her 6 dogs looking on. After 25 years in graphic design in Atlanta, life in Summerville is laid back and comfortably slow paced. In fact, if she runs out of dog food late at night, she and the dogs are just out of luck; the grocery store closes at 10:00.

But there is much to commend in this little town, population just under 5,000. After growing up in Rome, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Georgia, and then spending a successful career in the big city, she seems comfortably situated to pursue her career as a portrait painter in this small town with an amazing roster of accomplished artists.

The daughter of a Rome lawyer and judge, Suzanne says she was always the little kid who ragged the others to be more careful in coloring between the lines. She’d even make her own drawings for the other kids to color. There were no art classes to speak of in Rome during her formative years, so she grew up a tom boy, and eventually intended to follow her dad into the law. Instead, art struck. She thinks she probably got a lot of praise from her parents for little things she drew as a child, and that probably encouraged her, perhaps subconsciously, to pursue an art career. In Atlanta she enjoyed life in the big city for many years until she went out to the grocery store late one night and it took her 45 minutes to go a few blocks for milk. Enough. So she left the success of Atlanta behind, which included designing the state quarter we all see in our pocket change. She modestly says she probably got the job because her college roommate worked for the governor, and Suzanne was the only artist she knew!

Putting her house on the market so she could move to Rome to help care for her aging parents, she sold it almost immediately, with the proviso that she vacate in two weeks. Nothing she wanted was available in Rome, so a friend told her about a house in nearby Summerville that was available. Ironically her house sits in what was the back yard of her great grandmother’s house. Small world. Small town.

Suzanne’s portrait style might be termed photographic, though not obnoxiously so. She paints standing up because she says sitting distorts what she does; if she sits she is either looking up or down or from one side at her painting. She begins by making digital images of her subject. With those photos to go by, she makes a drawing in paint that seems to be more painting than drawing because of the detail it shows. The client then gets a look at what she’s done before she continues. With their approval at that stage, she begins what may be a 6-month process to complete the work. The joy in the process is to simply see if she can do it. She says what she does is like solving a puzzle, in that the many colors that make up a face have to be knitted together in the right mix or the final results don’t work. Children are particularly tricky because their parents have been used to seeing their faces every day since birth. They want to see the subtleties of their expressions accurately rendered, and are quick to notice when that doesn’t happen. “You get to know the people you paint pretty intimately,” she says. “I don’t like to redo a painting if I don’t have to. The first time it’s fun; the next time it’s too much like work. I also get to know their faces well too, and when I see them again after several years and they have completely changed, it’s almost like feeling betrayed.”

One unusual commission she once had was to paint two copies of what some believe was a self portrait of Ellen Axson Wilson, the Rome-born wife of President Woodrow Wilson. Supposedly one was to hang in the Georgia state house and the other was to hang in the White House, because there was no known portrait of Mrs. Wilson hanging there. Or so “they” thought. Of course it turned out that there was indeed a portrait of Mrs. Wilson already in residence. Now the second painting is looking for a home, possibly at the University of Georgia. Painting the first copy was fun, but the second copy was much less exciting because she had already mastered the challenge and was just repeating herself. The style of the original painting she was copying was so radically different from her own that it made for a whole new set of challenges. Her preferred style is to create a thick, layered look. The original Wilson painting was done with a limited palette of colors- five to be exact- and employed very thin paint.

Sometimes artists struggle to know when a work is done. They don’t always know when to quit, which is not a problem for her, she says. She likes the feeling of coming in to her studio first thing in the morning and seeing something she has been working towards completing only to realize that it is actually finished. “Once I’m finished the magic is mostly gone for me,” says Suzanne.

Suzanne exhibits her work at hanging Around Rome and at the Rome Area Council for the Arts Gallery, as well as at the Foothills Gallery in LaFayette, which opened last fall. The gallery includes an eclectic array of works by potters, woodworkers, sculptors, glass artists, painters, and photographers. When she was originally invited to meet with several local artists she envisioned a group of little old ladies making pot holders. Not hardly. “I was stunned when I got there and saw that there are some phenomenal artists in Summerville and the area around here, including Lookout Mountain,” she recalls. “We do a lot of community outreach in exchange for the city of LaFayette giving us our building rent free.”

She doesn’t know if she’ll live out her days in Summerville, but right now, you get the feeling that she believes this is the time and place where she’ll make what she can of her talents.LV