Sunseri works with the materials available

by Chris Braithwaite

EAST CRAFTSBURY — Saturday’s opening of Don Sunseri’s show at the Tamarack Gallery gave people a chance to say goodbye to the West Glover artist, and they took full advantage. 

It was a rare and colorful conjunction of communities.  There were many who have known Mr. Sunseri as a neighbor.  The art community was well represented.  There were Friends from the Barton Meeting of the Quakers, where Mr. Sunseri is a member. And there was a substantial contingent from the Bread & Puppet Theater, where Mr. Sunseri has performed for many years.  The theater’s pine forest, over the years, has provided tens of thousands of visitors with a look at the work of GRACE artists.  Those paintings and sculptures, and the surprising people who created them, are surely Mr. Sunseri’s major legacy.

But Saturday’s show was about Mr. Sunseri’s own work.  His paintings and collages of “sticks” filled the walls of the barn’s main floor and, in the late afternoon, drew visitors into the corner where Mr. Sunseri sat in a chair, holding court. 

“I’ve never sold so much work in my life,” Mr. Sunseri said in an interview Monday. 

That was another important function of the show, which was organized by gallery owners Liz Nelson and Kathy Stark. 

“They’re the ones who did the selling,” Mr. Sunseri said.  “One of my many crazinesses is about this whole commercial aspect of being an artist.  I’ve not been very good at that.” 

But money wasn’t the primary point of the sales. Mr. Sunseri was happy to learn, after Saturday’s opening, that so much of his work had gone to friends.

“I’d already named a little committee to eventually go through my stuff.  I had a list of people who I’d like to pick things out.” 

The sales at his show, he said, “kind of worked out that way.”

Another aspect of the painful necessity of selling one’s best work has been resolved for the artist.  “Part of the craziness is, if you sell a piece, you don’t have it to look at anymore.”

Mr. Sunseri has been told that he shouldn’t expect to see the fall.  He has been battling cancer of the pancreas for some time, and the physical battle is about over. 

Mr. Sunseri is a short man, but he will be remembered for his stocky solidity, the frame of a particularly robust gnome. That solidity has abandoned his body. But despite his apology for the effects of morphine — like a loud radio, always playing — the solidity remains in his voice.  And it is most definitely in his eyes, which flash an unmistakable command.

Don’t waste my time.

As Saturday’s appearance in Craftsbury and, indeed, an interview with his local newspaper might suggest, Mr. Sunseri is not retreating into death.  He is instead trying to work with it. 

And work, for this artist, is not a matter of taking his material where he wants it to go.  That, he said, “is the important point about everything I do.”

“I don’t start with a clear idea or image — this is a horse, this is a bowl of cherries, this is death and life.” 

Working on a collage of rattan sticks wound with raffia, “I start out to keep my hands busy, sort of like knitting.”

The point, he said, is to clear his mind so he can reach “the stuff going on in my unconscious — to set my mind free to go wherever it’s going to go.”

The result is typically a loose, organic form set against a rigid, crystalline grid.  “These two forms come together, inseparable and at the same time pushing against each other.  It’s like people.”

“It’s the same with all the stuff I make,” Mr. Sunseri said.  “With paint, I try to get to the place where my hand is automatically applying paint. Sensually, it’s very satisfying.”

Mr. Sunseri’s career as artist and teacher of art began in Chicago, moved to the West Coast, and then to New York City, where he lived for nine years. 

His rattan and raffia “sticks” have evolved from rougher materials, real sticks and rocks that he would travel to Vermont to collect.  Over time, he recalls, the gathering trips came to last longer than his stays in the city.  “At a certain point I couldn’t go back to New York.” 

He moved to Walden in 1974 with his wife (they have since divorced) and their son, Dakota.  Like most urban people who were drawn to Vermont by its lush summer landscapes, Mr. Sunseri was in for a shock. 

“There has been a lot of struggle,” he said. “If I knew then, entering my first winter in that funky old house, what I know now, I could not have survived.” 

He got by on not knowing he couldn’t — “getting wood daily, tobogganing it down to the house.  No car.  I found ways to survive.”

   Mr. Sunseri moved to Glover in 1975, and in about 1980 bought an elderly farmhouse in the Andersonville neighborhood.  It has since been extensively renovated, and is locally famous for its elaborately arranged stacks of firewood. 

“I no longer have to wrap the house in plastic,” Mr. Sunseri said.  “I have a car that’s dependable.”

Given Mr. Sunseri’s approach to the materials at hand, it would be a mistake to call what followed an accident, but fair enough to call it unintentional.

“I never set out to make GRACE,” he said. He needed a job, and was only sure of what he didn’t want to do — teach art.

“I had done a lot of teaching.  I was completely burnt out on teaching.  I realized later that I was a good teacher, as long as I was learning from it.  But up here I thought I would never teach again.

To support his career as an artist, he found work in the kitchen at a nursing home, the St. Johnsbury Convalescent Center.

And his new material was at hand.  “I realized there is something to learn here. And here are the people who are going to teach me.”

His teachers were old; so old that they could no longer care for themselves.  Most had done nothing they would describe as art since they put down the crayons of their childhood and did not, in their wildest dreams, see themselves as artists.

Mr. Sunseri was able to show them that they were. The works of GRACE artists have traveled to galleries of the major cities on the East Coast of this country and crossed the Atlantic to Europe.  GRACE, its artists and their work, have been much discussed in the journals of the art world and have been the subject of so many newspaper articles that Mr. Sunseri felt obliged to extract a promise that the words “Amazing Grace” would not appear in the headline of this one.

Students, to Sunseri the teacher, get the same sort of awed respect that Sunseri the artist gives to his materials. 

“From the very beginning I was astounded by what these people were producing — if I kept my hands off it.

“Teaching for many people means controlling. That’s all it means.”

“I saw something incredible going on.  I eventually figured out what I was not doing, and I tried to stay with that approach.”

The approach is a million miles removed from the arts and crafts that are typically used to distract those who, through age or circumstance, find themselves in caring institutions with nothing to do.

Mr. Sunseri recalled a woman contemplating a small bud vase with a single flower.  She began by tracing the contours of the base on paper. 

“Eventually she painted three flowers,” Mr. Sunseri said. She showed the vase from all angles. She was doing what we call cubism. At art school, someone would have said, ‘You’ve been looking at too much Picasso.’  But she’d never seen a Picasso.”

What such people taught Mr. Sunseri was to forget what he’d learned in school.

“When you’re a trained artist, you get out of art school knowing all the rules.  Everything we do is governed by what we learned from these authorities.

“I’ve come to learn from these folks that the real authority is yourself.  They don’t know what they’re supposed to not know.  They work from their own personal center.  It’s something they’re driven to do.  It’s such a great lesson!”

The lesson, the artist says, is clearly reflected in his own work.  “There are a lot of different approaches, surfaces, formats — stuff I was told I shouldn’t do.”  The art school formula is to specialize, he said.  “You find what your system is, and stay with it.

“But the involvement I have with my work is trying out any notion that comes to me.”

The show that opened Saturday is a particularly satisfying endorsement of that approach.  “I love to see how it all goes together.  Two pieces that have nothing to do with each other end up talking to each other.”

Leaving New York was a difficult career decision for the artist, because it meant leaving the world of Big Art. 

“For a couple of years I thought I could do both — keep up with the New York art scene and have my life in Vermont.  But you can only do that if you have a trust fund.”

Instead, Mr. Sunseri said, he found a new community that brought him back into “this crazy thing about money and art.” 

“The GRACE work provided me with a community of artists.  We had the same kind of talks artists have everywhere.  It enabled me, for better or worse, to avoid the Big Art world.  But I had to become a dealer, to sell the GRACE people’s art.”

Indeed, if GRACE was going to amount to more than the transitory accomplishment of a single, brilliant teacher, Mr. Sunseri had to become more than a dealer.  From the outset, he had to be something of an entrepreneur of the arts, who could find grant money and keep it flowing.  And something of a bureaucrat, who could fashion an institution that had a fair chance of surviving its founder.

The idea was clear enough: “We help people feel secure about trusting themselves.”

But as a teaching technique, it could be hard to codify:  “We do anything we need to do to get that activity going, to remove the mind.  That’s what prevents people from doing things — that big ‘I can’t’”

In trying to institutionalize this approach, Mr. Sunseri said, “I was incredibly fortunate to find people who got it right away.  We now perpetuate this way of working with people.  There are no rules.”

GRACE (the full title is Grass Roots Art and Community Effort) has a staff of about six, Mr. Sunseri calculates, and last year found permanent quarters in the old firehouse in Hardwick. 

Mr. Sunseri looks at the course of his own life and that of the organization he founded with remarkable objectivity. 

“The timing was good,” he said.  His illness wasn’t diagnosed until after the new quarters had been secured. 

But as for GRACE itself, he said, “I had been having trouble letting it go.  This made it real easy.  I said, ‘I have a new job, guys.’”

It’s a job he is prepared to address directly.

“This is not a light time in my life. Indications are, I won’t be alive much longer.

“I’ve lived my life this way, doing things my own way, being flexible and being spontaneous.”

His approach, he said, “in making my work, and with the GRACE people, and with my life, has always been to use what I have in hand.  The stuff that I’m using determines what the art is going to be.

“With living in general, it’s no different. What I’ve got now, I’ve got.  And I’ve got to work with it.  To see what I can get out of it.”

It was a struggle, for this teacher who learns from his students, to find the words to describe his approach to the lesson ahead.

“You can learn how to do something from a teacher. But there’s another kind of learning….Maybe it’s just learning to be aware of what you’re doing. 

“Living and dying, I don’t know where it fits in. 

“Talk about an unknown!  This is certainly a big mystery.  There is an opportunity to turn this into a big adventure.

“I’m trying.”