Of the 100 works at John’s Island’s annual art show, one painting stood out among the sunlit scenes of Florida, the still lifes and animal studies. Only Susan Lawson Bouma’s “Abstract #5” showed a resolute commitment to pure abstraction.
Over a painterly field of gray, pale blue and ochre, a blood-red patch of paint floats above the composition’s center, like an ominous cloud. Black marks scattered across the canvas add to the painting’s mystery, like indecipherable calligraphy.
Even the title offers no hint of the work’s meaning; normally Bouma doesn’t title her works at all.
“I called it ‘Abstract #5’ for the art show. But it does not mean anything,” she says.
The enigma doesn’t end there. Despite Bouma’s public presence as board member of the Vero Beach Museum of Art, and lending her name to an art prize she and her late husband endowed at Coe College in Iowa, she keeps her own career as a painter largely private.
Though she has painted for close to 50 years, she does not show her paintings publicly, nor does she sell them, preferring to give them away or hang them in her home.
And despite her extensive experience, abstract painting is new to her, begun only three years ago. In that time, Bouma has reached a remarkable degree of competence in her expressionistic abstractions.
She credits her progress to the guidance of local contemporary painters Shotsi Lajoie, Tim Sanchez, and Deborah Gooch. Bouma attends Gooch’s contemporary painting class at the museum three times week, typically laying claim to a spot up front to set up her easel up front, Gooch says, where she can stand back a good 15 feet to get perspective as she works.
“Susan is just high energy,” says Gooch, who hesitates to use the term “students” in this class since they are already at advanced or intermediate levels. “She works big, she works aggressively. She is an inspiration for a lot of people who need to see what kind of energy – intellectual, creative energy, physical energy even – that it takes to paint.”
In turn, Bouma listens to her fellow painters. “Everybody is moving into abstract art because that’s what Debbie’s teaching. I like the feedback from the other students, I like to look at their work, and I love the advice that I get from Debbie,” Bouma says.
High praise, indeed, from a woman who has studied art in America’s major cities: New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Bouma’s roots, however, reach back to Cedar Rapids, where salt-of-the-earth values were famously celebrated by the likes of Grant Wood, who painted the “typical” Iowa farm family in his “American Gothic” of 1930.
For Bouma, it is Wood’s friend and fellow Iowan Marvin Cone who sums up the plainspoken truth of Iowa’s rolling hills, barns and toiling farmers.
Born in 1891, Wood and Cone studied art in France together, and helped found Iowa’s Stone City Art Colony. But whereas Wood came to be identified as a leading light of American Scene painting, Cone was content to work in relative obscurity.
Cone was a fixture at Coe College, where he taught art for more than 40 years. Its collection of over 60 of Cone’s artworks was largely curated by the artist himself to represent the best examples of his oeuvre.
Bouma remembers Cone’s presence on campus. She majored in English and history at Coe, and met her late husband Bob there; he died in 2010.
If Bouma has one regret from that time, it is that she missed the opportunity to study art under Cone. Years later, in tribute to the school where they fell in love, Bouma and her husband endowed the Susan Lawson Bouma Art Prize, which has encouraged outstanding Coe College art students for more than 20 years.
After Bob graduated with a degree from the University of Iowa’s School of Law, the young couple moved to New York City, where Susan took a job subbing in the New York City school system. Particular memorable was the time she filled out the remainder of a term for a junior high art teacher who quit after a student threw a jar of paint at her.
While Bouma was spared that indignity, she never taught another art class after that one, though she was inspired by the experience to begin taking art lessons herself. She signed up for study at New York’s progressive New School for Social Research, where her teacher was painter Theo Hios. That was in the mid-1960s.
“Ever since then I’ve been taking art classes. I’ve had some wonderful teachers,” she says.
She took classes in portrait painting and landscape, always working in oil. She loved French Impressionism, and says that she learned to paint by copying its masterworks. It was not until she and Bob moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s that she learned about early American Impressionism, in a show that Bouma remembers as being on loan to UCLA from the collection of Daniel J. Terra.
“I was so enthralled. This man had an entire collection of American Impressionist artists, and I’d never heard of any of them.”
In 1978 the Boumas settled in the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, where Susan focused on raising their son and daughter. She also continued her art education, establishing a studio in her home and forming an art group with some like-minded painters. She took lessons at the Evanston Art Center through the 1980s with a painter named Allan Gavan, and also studied with Michael Croydon, a sculptor who headed the art department at Lake Forest College.
Bouma and her husband became winter residents of Vero Beach in 2008 after visiting on the recommendation of Lake Forest friends.
“I was not interested in (creating) abstract art until I came to Vero Beach,” she says.
Early inspiration came from seeing the work of abstract painter Clara Dodd Blalock at Meghan Candler Gallery, but when Bouma decided to try painting a few abstracts of her own, she quickly realized that she wanted to stain raw canvas “like Helen Frankenthaler.”
For this she enlisted the help of painter Shotsi Lajoie, whose free-flowing works she saw at Tiger Lily Gallery. In addition to getting a poured paint tutorial from Lajoie in Bouma’s studio garage, Bouma’s feeling for abstract painting has also been nurtured by critique from local abstract painter Tim Sanchez. She has also taken a page or two from the work of historically important American artists, including Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell.
Glancing at a fresh painting on her easel, Bouma reminds herself that experience, after all, is the best teacher.
“I think this one is almost finished,” she muses, adding, “As Debbie (Gooch) always says, you have to know when is ‘when.’”
With luck, the painting may end up displayed in her home alongside others she has done, though of late, Bouma’s daughter has been asking for them. “She likes the abstract paintings,” Bouma says, a hint of pleasure in her voice.
