Susan Johnson
Avalanche, Wisconsin
 

Johnson and her husband, Daniel Arnold, built the weaving workshop in Avalanche nearly eight years ago.  Before that, it was Pie, a corner shop in Westby.  And before that it was one loom in the upper room of their barn, with children playing at her feet while Johnson taught herself to weave.  Before that?  Well, keep on going and you get a little girl growing up in Ely, Minnesota, who had a particular love of “playing store.”  Toy stores, especially, could stir within her such a feeling of excitement that she recalls the emotion acutely to this day.  “I just wanted things so desperately,” she says.  “Like the Ginny Dolls on display.  It was almost like all of them were alive and talking, beckoning to me.  They were eight-inch plastic molded dolls with glued-on wigs.  Their eyes, which opened and closed, were the most beautiful, deep blue, perfect.  They came in a Ginny box with tissue paper around them, all in different, colorful outfits.  The Ginny Dolls I wanted most, which I never got, had a big, white fur coat like a polar bear, a tall white Russian fur hat, a white fur muff and little ice skates.  She was just fabulous!”

 Inside Johnson’s shop, the influence of that early memory seems apparent.  And what becomes clear, as she talks, is that these eidetic memories of her early childhood still act as touchstones for her inner life as an artist.

“I remember being two,” she said, “Images mostly, but very clear.  I remember the bassinet where my baby sister slept, the patterns on the skirt around it, standing on tiptoes trying to look in but not being able to because it was too high.  I remember the scale of things, the light in the room.  I remember that power feeling I had of holding the pencil and doing what I thought was writing on paper for the first time.

 “I had these strong impressions, with an emotional complement to them, or temperature,” Johnson says.  “I felt like an observer inside myself.  As you get older, your memories are intermingled with what other people tell you about them or what you think you should think about them.  The earliest memories are the most important to me because they are least colored by thought or prejudice, the least connected to any narrative.”

One day, when she was two, her mother wrapped her in her coat and hat, and sent her outside to play.  It was a grey day, cold and wintry, nothing memorable about it.  Yet, she has never forgotten it.

“I was alone, walking,” Johnson says.  “It was dismal and cold, everything grey.  There was a cornfield about a block and a half from our house; I was there, squatting between the rows of corn stubble, poking around in the dirt, and I had this feeling of…impossible joy.  It was a strong feeling of potential and hope, excitement, that everything is here for the taking, this feeling like cornucopia.”

More than fifty years later, standing at her loom, this memory is as relevant and important to Johnson as it ever was.  A single moment in her life serves as a reminder to her of the potential and power of her own brain.  On this day in January she is weaving strands of chenille onto a warp of silk.  The scarf she is making is an offset plaid with block of color and shading that give a sense of Japanese design.  “I’ve done three of these scarves now,’ she says, “and this fourth one is where I think I’m finally getting close to what I’m wanting.  I’m happier now with the way it looks.  I like to do several things in a row like this, close enough that I can make adjustments, but letting enough time pass in between.  If I give a little bit of space before I start the next one, it will be related to the first, but it will probably take the best of that.”

Johnson often begins a project with no more than an image or a feeling of what she’d like to create.  She may not be exactly sure of what the final thing will be, but she is confident she will know it when she sees it.  The striking woven warp with rya knots, which she calls All My Eggs in  One Basket, began as an image in her mind one morning while she was having coffee and staring at the patterns the frost made on her windowpane.  The idea for her popular wooly bully bags came to her at a dance one night while she was dancing to an old favorite by Domingo Samudio.  The wooly bear caterpillar potholders that she made two summers ago grew out of her fascination with the beautiful, striped creatures crawling around outside her shop.

 “There’s nothing magical about it,” says Johnson about her creative process.  She likes to demystify the artistic journey, whether it’s weaving, writing, or any other art form.  “I don’t think it serves anybody to make it (the life of an artist) seem exalted,” she says.  “Really, it’s just one way of being human, one of the myriad ways of being human.  And it really doesn’t matter which path you take.  Once you recognize your path, you simply take the next step.  You do what it is right before you to do.  And then you do the next thing.”

But this process by which thought becomes art is not without its mystery.  And sometimes magic does happen.  What seems true is that there is ever an unfolding, an opening into the next new thing.  Johnson likens it to following a thread, barely visible out of the corner of her mind.  A perfect potholder leans into the next thing, the rug she is weaving becomes a path to a new idea.  One day she is aware that something has shifted, that she is working at a new level.  And there it is again, the feeling of potency she felt when she was two among the corn stubble.  If she lets herself get too far away from that feeling, she finds that her vision is not as clear; the thing pulling at her seems weaker, harder to grasp.

When Johnson takes the finished chenille scarf off the loom and washes it, it will become softer and more blended.  The finished product will go on display in her shop; in her won mind, it will serve to inform her next piece, and in a day or so, she will begin again.

As each ending becomes a platform for the next beginning, Johnson’s life as an artist deepens and expands.  Her goal?  Simply to stay on the path, to follow the thread of what inspires and excites her.  As she goes along, her art reflects not only her heritage, but a joy of creating that inspires others, near and far.

Interview by Kate Fitzgerald
courtesy of the Kickapoo Free Press

Photographs by Susan Johnson and Jerry Quebe