Susan Voss tried to capture the personality of hurricanes on canvas.
Susan Voss
The Scoop: Are hurricanes beautiful? Do they have personality? Susan Voss thinks so. Voss is an entomologist and a researcher at Emory University in Atlanta, but also a painter of hurricanes. She sells her paintings to help those often overlooked victims of hurricanes -- the household pets left behind. Her artwork underscores not only the terrible beauty of tropical cyclones, but how modern meteorological tools allow us to see how each storm takes on a personality all its own.
11:58 AM LarryO': Hello Susan.
11:59 AM Susan Voss: Hi, Larry.
LarryO': Thanks for being willing to chat about your art activities.
Susan Voss: Absolutely; it's a pleasure to speak with you.
12:00 PM LarryO': So where are you located?
Susan Voss: Atlanta, GA. I've been here since 1976.
12:02 PM
LarryO': So how long have you been a painter?
12:03 PM Susan Voss: On and off, all my life. It's something that I reward myself with if I've been good :)
LarryO': So you must really enjoy it!
You are an entomologist by profession, Right?
12:04 PM Susan Voss: Very much... having two dogs that want me to play with them makes it hard sometimes!
My PhD is in entomology, but I do research at Emory
I run a tissue culture core for the epithelial pathology department.
12:05 PM LarryO': Do your paintings ever resemble things you work with?
12:06 PM Susan Voss: Yes and no... I get inspired by all kinds of things...
I might see something in a newspaper and that will be an inspiration... but lately, its been hurricanes.
12:07 PM Not just the storms themselves, but maybe a picture of a dog stranded in the middle of a flooded area, something like that.
It's such a big part of nature. I suppose I got this idea though from little things.
12:08 PM That is, in the mid 80s when I was working on my dissertation, I took pictures of fire ant eggs with a florescent microscope.
12:09 PM LarryO': That sure is micro to a hurricane's macro.
Susan Voss: Those were such cool images! The cells in different stages of miosis and mitosis.
Yes exactly!
But if you squint, they look very similar.
12:10 PM In some ways nature has her own reusable template, and you see it in the big and in the small alike.
12:11 PM LarryO': Hurricanes are certainly similar in appearance to many things -- galaxies to water swirling down the drain.
But are these more like portraits?
12:12 PM Susan Voss: yes, that's a good way to describe them. Since we give hurricanes names, they take on personalities....
So it seems only natural to make "portraits" of them.
12:13 PM They are like portraits of kings and queens, these grand figures that make an impact on so many people's lives.
12:14 PM LarryO': Almost short-lived gods in a way. How was it to paint one named the same as your daughter -- Katrina?
Susan Voss: Yes, gods and goddesses!
12:15 PM Well, that was what got me started. My daughter is a broadcast meteorologist, Katrina Voss. We were talking one day about how the satellite pictures looked like cells...
12:16 PM and looking at Hurricane Katrina in particular, it was such a concentric storm at it's strongest.
So I thought, I should paint that.
LarryO': Where did the colors come from?
12:17 PM Susan Voss: Really, the colors are not "real" in the sense that the satellite image imposes those colors.
So, I made several versions of Katrina in different colors.
12:18 PM LarryO': Was there something you were trying to convey about the storm?
Susan Voss: Well, you said it best actually, Larry. In a word, the personality.
12:19 PM That it is a "thing," a presence that is made up of water and energy, but it always has it's own essence.
12:20 PM A destructive thing, but a necessary thing. I'm not a meteorologist, but I know hurricanes are sort of nature's redistribution of energy.
12:21 PM LarryO': So easy for us to personify such a thing. Do you share your work with other researchers? If so, what do they think?
12:22 PM Susan Voss: I think they "get it," maybe it's something we scientists share. That we deal with these little organisms (or big organisms) so much, we come to know them in a way.
12:23 PM LarryO': Do any of your colleagues have any similar artistic tendencies?
12:24 PM Susan Voss: I think all scientists have a bit of the tortured artist. It's an outlet, I suppose. I know people who write short stories or play drums.
LarryO': I guess that makes sense. Science is a creative endeavor, after all.
12:25 PM Susan Voss: Indeed. People try to make the scientist into an objective observer, but really, everything we see as scientists or as people is through our own lens.
12:26 PM LarryO': I remember a professor of geology when I was a student who made large format images of minerals from a petrographic microscope.
12:27 PM Susan Voss: Did he have them framed?
LarryO': They were posted in the halls of the Earth Sciences Department.
No frames, looked nice without them.
Susan Voss: nice.
LarryO': They were huge -- 4'X4' or something like that.
12:28 PM Susan Voss: In a way, and this is something Katrina (my daughter) has pointed out... now that we can "see" things, either with microscopes or through satellite images, it's easier to anthropomorphize them.
LarryO': But in the case of this professor (more than 20 years ago), I heard he was forced to stop making them. Somehow it wasn't seen as appropriate.
12:29 PM Susan Voss: Someone thought they were offensive?
LarryO': Just that he might not be taken seriously as a geologist if he spent too much time doing art. Silly.
12:30 PM Susan Voss: Ah, silly! He was ahead of his time!
LarryO': I agreed! I still just adore sciency art -- hence my interest in your work.
12:31 PM Susan Voss: I guess artists have always painted what they can see, but it's a nice change to paint what can't be seen, either because it's too big or too small.
So we can mimic the eyes of our tools- microscopes, etc.
12:32 PM LarryO': Huge new realms of perception!
Susan Voss: Yes, like Matisse and Picasso were doing with fauvism, right?
12:33 PM Art that is too much like what we see with our everyday eyes might as well be photography.
LarryO': Yep. Makes sense.
12:34 PM Oh, and I hear you sell your paintings and give the money to a charity?
Susan Voss: Yes. On Ebay.
I like to give the proceeds to a charity called Noah's Wish. They help pets after natural disasters.
12:35 PM LarryO': Well there's poetic balance in that!
12:36 PM Susan Voss: I'm a big animal lover, and my dogs mean the world to me. So I like that there are people out there who remember that pets too suffer when there's a hurricane or an earthquake.
Thanks!
12:37 PM LarryO': No problem. I just adopted 2 puppies and my wife & kids are dealing with the pee-stained tiles in our family room this very minute.
I love dogs
12:38 PM Susan Voss: Ha ha, it's worth it, isn't it?
LarryO': Yep. I can never adopt just one puppy. They need company.
Susan Voss: After my own heart...
12:39 PM LarryO': Well. I'd better let you go (and get to helping my wife). Thanks so much for your help with this.
Susan Voss: Thank you! It was a pleasure. Good luck with the puppies!
Article posted January 23, 2008.
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