A conversation with painter and percussionist Sue Matthews

Thea

Hi, Sue.

Sue

Hey.

Thea

So you were my high school art teacher, but you had a whole life before that. I want to start with how you first got into art and how that journey led you to some of your favorite subjects — rituals — which are why we’re talking today.

Sue

Well, the first memories I have of making art, I was four years old, and it’s all I cared about. I just drew and drew with crayons and did different kinds of things, experimented with that as a little kid. That’s all I wanted to do. Later, when I got to high school, I didn’t have time because I had to work and go to school, which was already enough. So I stopped doing art in high school. There was one high school art teacher who stamped down our creativity and gave us too many rules. When I got to Berkeley, I was taking art history classes, and I didn’t want to just listen. I disagreed with a lot of the professor’s interpretations. I wanted to do all the paintings that they were talking about, and I said, I think I’m in the wrong area. I need to be doing this stuff. So I started taking practice art classes. I think I started with drawing.

In my first painting class we put up all our work, and the teacher, George Miyasaki, was very stern, and he said, “There’s only one painting in this room,” and everybody was scared. And then he pointed to mine and said, “This is the only painting in the room.” To this day I don’t know why he picked mine, but I was like, “Oh, really?”

And then I had teachers telling me, “You need to major in art. This is what you need to do”. So I thought, well, if they’re telling me this, then I’m going to do it. My old high school teacher, Stan Cardinet, said if he had it to do over again, he would have become an artist. And I was like, you mean you could do that? Because I grew up in East Oakland in a working class world, and I didn’t know any artists, and nobody would think of doing that because you couldn’t make any money at it. But these mentors were encouraging me, and my parents were not against it. So I majored in art at Berkeley.

I couldn’t do math. I have astigmatism. It was really hard for me to read. The only thing I could really focus on 100% was making art. It was just fantastic. So I just made art all the time. I got through Berkeley.

And as far as the ritual stuff, well I grew up Catholic. I’m not Catholic now. The minute I turned 18, I walked out of my mom’s house and I said, I’m not going to any more masses. However, I used to go to Mexico all the time, and when I was in Mexico, I’d go into the Baroque churches.  From my early 20s all the way through this past June, I have been in many, many, many, many Baroque churches all over Mexico, and there’s so much fabulous art in there.

I could read the symbolism, having grown up Catholic, and I knew what the stories were about. But it interested me most because it was a hybrid form of art. The churches are full of these huge, huge, immense paintings that are a combination of a European, Spanish, and Native American concept. And I sort of feel like that still exists today, that combination. I mean, we are always thinking about the native people that were here. As Americans, we are very aware of this. We’re very aware of slavery. The history is just floating around us. And growing up in East Oakland, it was not a white environment. I never really got the idea that I could only paint white people because I’m white, because my friends were every different nationality.

I had been playing drums, studying music at La Pena Cultural Center, so when I first got to Cuba I felt completely at home because everybody spoke Spanish and everybody pretty much was Black or Latin. And that was the neighborhood I grew up in, in East Oakland. Spanish was being spoken, and it was Latin and Black people. So I was at home in Cuba, and then I got very involved in playing drums, and along with playing drums, I learned about the folklore.

It’s not really folklore if you think of that word as referring to something in the past. It’s living religion in Cuba. If you study in Cuba you learn about all the deities, and you learn about how the rhythms support those deities and bring them down. I was able to go into these very sacred environments. Sometimes people would take us in as students of drumming. They would take us to rituals and introduce us to the spiritual side of drumming. I wanted to learn about it. People say it’s syncretized with Catholicism, but I don’t think it really is at all. The images are, in a lot of cases. For example Chango in the Afro-Cuban tradition is the god of thunder and male sexuality, and they just use Santa Barbara as a symbol of Chango because her colors are the same as the African Chango, red and white.

I grew up Catholic, and I can tell you there is nothing Catholic in these rituals. I’ve checked it out with a scholar friend of mine, Lazaro Pedroso. He agreed that there’s nothing Catholic in the rituals. So I don’t know about that syncretism. They did have to hide behind those Catholic images to keep them to make it look like it was syncretized, but I don’t see it.

Anyway, I was introduced to the ritual part of it and became very interested in that. And then I was invited to join a collaborative multimedia team of artists investigating the connections between a small town in rural Matanzas province and a traditional village in Ghana called Dzodze. We called our project Secrets Under the Skin. It was a group of artists and scholars from the University of Alaska Anchorage. The lead researcher, Jill Flanders Crosby, was a dance instructor at UAA.  There was a videographer, photographer and writer also from UAA, a Cuban practitioner in the tradition, and a translator-transcriber, both living in Havana. I was the painter from Oakland. So our team that worked on the project for over ten years.  We interviewed people about their African ancestors, attended rituals, and were invited into sacred spaces.  We also spent a month in Ghana, where we were able to recognize many similarities in the rituals, rhythms, and shrines. As a painter and drummer, I had already been working on this subject matter, but it was more from a popular angle. For example, rumba is tied to the folklore, in the sense that it incorporates sacred rhythms and songs, but it has moved into popular culture and is performed on the streets and in night clubs. And then with this project, Secrets Under the Skin, I got deeper into the actual ritual, more or less as an observer. But I could play. I knew the music…  I’m not initiated, but in one instance I was  recruited to play the chekere, (a beaded gourd) and sing. It was a very intense experience.

Thea

Based on what you’ve told me and also a lot of things that I have seen in your art over the years, I wonder if you could elaborate briefly on the relationship you have with race in your art, because I’m sure that comes up a lot for you. As a white woman who paints a lot of Black and Brown subjects, you probably have a situation come up sometimes where people assume that you’re actually of color and then they find out you’re not. What happens then? How do you address it? And what’s usually the outcome?

Sue

That is a very interesting question, and I want to go back to when I first started painting figures, because I was from East Oakland and there weren’t very many white people out there. I thought, well, who am I supposed to paint? I didn’t want to paint only white people. So I painted a whole series of paintings of dogs that had human characteristics.  I was able to avoid the issue of race but still paint about human emotions. I finally just started painting people that I knew, people in my neighborhood, people that I went to school with. And they were all of different races. And I liked these paintings. They’re 7ft tall. They’re larger than life. I showed them to a gallerist after graduate school and she said, well, what’s this ethnic thing? And I was like, “Oh, was I just supposed to paint only white people?” I mean, I didn’t grow up in the hills. I didn’t really share that culture. I didn’t come from money. I came from the flatlands. So what was I supposed to paint? Who was I supposed to paint? Those are the people I knew about. I speak Spanish. I learned Spanish because my fourth grade teacher was Mexican, and she taught us Spanish, and I fell in love with it and continued to study it. And I spent a lot of time in Mexico. I was interested in culture, and there was just a lot more of it in the Latin world that I could grab onto. There was music. There was a belief in all the different saints. You go into a church in Mexico and you feel like you’re in some kind of a spiritual situation, whereas I didn’t feel that in any of the white churches up here. So I don’t know, it was just my environment, I think.

I never thought of myself as a bleeding heart liberal. I was in Cuba studying drumming, I was just in love with the ecstatic nature of the drumming and dancing along with the spiritual aspect.

I painted my teachers. I painted people I was studying with. I was working from a position of excitement, reacting to what I was doing, what I was learning, what I was studying. I wasn’t really thinking about the race of the people. These are the people I was studying with.  I would bring back photos of the paintings and give away prints. People loved it.

When I got back here, interestingly, I never had a lot of negativity on that subject, really. It’s just that my work was never shown in white galleries. It’s like they just couldn’t see it. They didn’t see it, but it  has been shown a lot in Black galleries and cultural centers. In fact, right now I have a show that was just put up yesterday in the president’s office in College of San Mateo where I teach. She is African American, and she is showing eight of my paintings for Black History Month. I found out that Black people like the images.  But when I show them to white gallery owners, I guess they feel like they can’t sell them or that I shouldn’t be painting them or something. So it’s kind of like the whole situation of race in this country.

The way I see it, if somebody is telling me, you can’t paint Black people because you’re white, would you then say to a Black person, well, you can’t paint white people because you’re Black? That’s a way of continuing to drive a chisel between the races. If you’re painting out of excitement and honesty, that’s all you need. My art is always responding to my environment or more recently, to situations. Like I have a painting about Ukraine, I have a painting about Iran, and I have a painting about January 6. We have finished the Cuba project, and I am working in other realms now. I’ve even shown my work in Ghana and Senegal. I showed in the Biennale in Dakar in 2016…

I think the image can be separated from the artist. The image has its own life. If I’m present, it might confuse people. But if I’m not there, they look at the painting and they see the image. Does that answer your question?

Thea

I think one of the most interesting things about this topic to me is that there’s a very similar conversation happening in fiction, which I write. And a lot of people have been asking, can white authors write characters of color? Is that okay to do? Is it okay to write outside of your culture? And there’s a whole program called Writing the Other that’s specifically about, like, here are some practical ways to try and do this without objectifying people or appropriating culture, et cetera. And the practical approach so often comes down to humanizing and doing your research, actually becoming familiar with the culture, with the people, and making sure you know what you’re talking about and being as humanizing as possible. And I find that with your work, in parallel to that effort that I’ve been trying to make more in my own fiction writing, your artwork always is at this human scale, and it’s not just respectful — you often incorporate semi-religious formats and iconography, and you tend to use a lot of gold leaf and frames and very interesting kinds of poses that almost deify your subjects, who are often just sort of folks. They’re not necessarily somebody who’s like a very important figure or anything. They’re people that you’ve met and people that you know. And I find that so interesting, and I don’t know if you want to talk anymore about that.

Sue

Yeah, there’s a lot to that.

You were talking about authors. I think it’s possibly the difference between painting and writing from a certain voice. I’m not really painting from a certain voice. I’m just painting my observations. So it doesn’t go that deep. But what does go deep is the knowledge that I have of these places. When I paint people playing drums, I know the rhythms they’re playing. I know the context. I’ve been there. I’ve played those rhythms or at least tried to learn them. So there is definitely a knowledge and a commitment. It’s not just, oh, I went on a vacation. They weren’t really vacations at all. We were going into very, very deep, sacred spaces. And I mean, if we went back when we go back to those places, we know the people, and they show us more and more things.

But for me, the drums were my entry point, because the drums really speak to the gods. I know that sounds funny, but the drums call the spirits and when you have that rhythm in your body it’s just different than walking into a room and looking at people. I know the rhythms they’re playing. I know who the deities they’re playing for. I can recognize certain deities through their dance. I really do know about what I’m painting about, but I’m not trying to go into the psychology of it the way a writer would. I think it’s different. It’s not quite as difficult.

I probably would have a hard time writing from the perspective of some of the people in my paintings. I could write about them, but I don’t think I’d be able to write in their voice. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try because I think if you’re interested in that kind of subject matter, I mean, we need to try to break down those taboos because they just perpetuate that otherness.

Here’s an example. Someone loved one of my paintings but he said, well, I don’t want to be accused of cultural appropriation. And I mean, he’s a white guy but I thought, just having an image of somebody Black in your office is cultural appropriation? See, that kind of thing, it just perpetuates this separation between the races, in my mind.

My paintings about Africa and Afro Cuba developed over about 20 years. I went to Africa four times. I always wanted to go to Cuba because I’d been to Mexico so much, and I speak Spanish. But I never knew I was going to get involved in it and I never knew I was going to go to Africa. But my brother ended up living in Niger, on the edge of the Sahara in the Sahel. We drove with some Fulani people through the desert around sand dunes and camels and everything else. And I met these people in their nomad encampment. I painted them because I thought they were beautiful. Beautiful. I mean, in order to survive in that environment, it seemed to me that you almost had to be the perfect human because if you had any flaws, you die, I think. I mean, you just had to be so strong. And so the people there were wow, they were really beautiful. So I painted them as icons, as if they were saints. And then anytime I sold one of those paintings or a print of it, I would send back money to them, because I had a contact person. She told me that they were able to get their own grain bank. Before that, they would sell the grain to somebody to store it for them, and then they would have to buy it back. And now they have their own grain bank. I still send money back there.

In the same way, all these Cuban images — we’ve given them to the people. They are on the altars and on the walls of the places that we visited. People like to see how they are interpreted in a portrait of them. So we always gave prints, videos and photos back to the people we worked with. So it’s not just snapping a photo and then making a painting out of it and selling it. It’s hard to sell the stuff anyway, to be honest. It’s not a big money making venture for me.

I finally came to the conclusion that I paint as a meditation more than, “oh, I’m going to sell this painting.” If you do that, you’d have to try to figure out the market. And I don’t think you can ever figure out the market. I think in fine art, what people respond to more often and really on a higher level is the depth of your commitment to whatever it is you’re doing.

There’s always a commercial aspect, but, if I were going to do that, I’d just rather not do art. I don’t care about the commercial aspect of it. It’s always nice to sell work because you’ve got to pay the rent and you spend a lot of your time making this stuff. So. Yeah. But the market has never been my entry point to why I want to paint an image.

Thea

In your artwork, do you feel like there’s an essence of that same powerful feeling that you get when you participate in a ritual as a drummer? Or when you’re adjacent to something or recording it for a painting? When you get into the painting itself, is there a spirituality to that for you, or a ritual?

Sue

Well, I do think you go into a trance state. You do go into a trance, and everything falls away. You don’t know what time it is. You don’t hear anything. You could be listening to something. I used to love to listen to baseball games. Once I get going, I don’t hear anything. I can’t follow. But I think maybe when you get into that state, you’re also receptive to things that kind of come through you.

I’m sort of a practical person. But I do feel that I couldn’t tell you how I do these images. I mean, there are just too many of them. They’re too big. They speak to people that I don’t even know. I don’t know how they came about. Your mind opens up somehow to a bigger reality. And I try to tell my students that you can’t just sit there and gab while you’re painting. You have to let yourself get into that space so that you can do more than you thought you could do.

And technically, too, you get into this space and all of a sudden you step back and you go, oh, wow, what happened there? I don’t know if it’s spirituality, but I think spirituality is also a way of getting into that trance state. I think my images, probably to a degree, came from myself as a little kid sitting in the church, looking at the saints, looking at the statues, this one statue of a person holding her eyes on a plate or some weird thing like that. I forget which saint. Theresa, I think. She’s holding a plate with her eyes on it, and you’re a little kid looking at that, and you’re thinking, what the heck? A lot of my paintings have that holy card sort of look to them with the embellished background or the gold leaf. That’s why I like to use gold leaf, because then all you have is the person without a context.

And that, to me, is very interesting too, to isolate the image that way. I’m looking at one right now, that big one over there. It was a situation where there were a bunch of drummers playing and there was a dancer who was lighting gunpowder to change the atmosphere so that deities could come down and dance. So I painted him, but I took away all the dancers. I took away everybody else. I just wanted to show the drummers and the guy that was trying to change the atmosphere. If I had put all the people flinging themselves around and dancing and all that, it would have just not really captured the silent place I was trying to talk about. The images do feel like they’re frozen in time, which is what a painting does. It isolates a certain situation and freezes it.

Thea

So that painting, titled All Shall Pass, do you want to tell me a little bit more about how you ended up in that place, witnessing this ritual, what it was like and how you came around to deciding to paint that subject?

Sue

The lead researcher for Secrets Under the Skin knew a Togolese guy who was connected to a priestess in that village. They wanted to do a ritual for us. That ritual was actually for us, and our team paid them to do it. Regardless of the reason for the ritual, people still went into trance. The University of Alaska is a research university, so it did provide some of the funds for the project. And people, if they’re going to get paid, are happy to share.

I remember the ground between my toes was soft and powdery. You have to take off your shoes. And in order to be present at a ritual like that in Ghana and Togo, you have to wear cloth. In other words, somebody gives you a piece of traditional cloth and you take off your street clothes and wrap it around yourself… You have to be barefoot so you can actually feel the earth under your feet. All of that sensory  information finds its way into the painting. It’s not like driving by and snapping a photo or copying a picture out of a National Geographic magazine.

Thea

I want to talk a little bit more about this idea of paying for a ritual, because I feel like that’s one where even in the tone when you were telling me about it, it was almost apologetic. But then thinking about it for a second, you were raised Catholic and there’s always like the little dish that goes around where they collect money and there is a long history of paying Catholic priests for various kinds of rituals. Or paying in some way or another to a shaman or for, like, an exorcism or all kinds of things. It’s a profession.

Sue

Well, yeah, you have to get paid. It’s just like getting paid for doing a painting once in a while, right? In fact, can I tell you a really quick story? There’s a painting of a woman inside her hut there. Do you see that one? She’s standing in front of a huge mound which is Togbui, the deity of sickness and health. I asked her if I could paint her and she agreed. And I said, yeah, but I’m not talking about in my sketchbook, I’m talking about a big painting that will be life size and will be shown in a gallery. People will see it in a public situation. And she said, well, let’s ask Togbui. And she threw the divination shells and  and Togbui said no. So I said, okay, well good that we asked. “Well,” she goes on, “No, let’s ask him again.” We had to ask him four times and each time gave him $10 and a bottle of locally made gin called Akpeteshie. It was poured down a hole in the mound into the earth. It’s not like somebody was going to drink it. She poured the bottles into the mound.  I was more than happy to go along with this  because the shells did come up negative and so Togbui was able to cash in on that a little bit. Why not? You have to.

Thea

It’s a fascinating area that people will have questions about, and I think that there’s an interesting double standard almost. That’s not the right word. But you hear people joke about Tech CEOs going to do like ayahuasca in South America or whatever, it’s almost like a joke. And then the flip side of that, white cultures just paying money to a Catholic Church or whatever. In the Christian traditions, a lot of money goes into that stuff. And the fact that you have been involved in kind of both sides of that is just interesting to me. And I wonder if you had thought about, like, is it different? Giving money to the church versus paying to watch a ritual in Ghana.

Sue

Or buying an artist’s painting there, yeah, I think they’re the same. When we were kids, we were poor, and my dad was supposed to give 10% of his salary to the Catholic Church. When I found that out later,  it really pissed me off, because we did not have that money to give. That was food money. And look at how much the money the Vatican has. But in terms of the rituals, I mean, yeah, people have to make their money. But it’s also paying tribute as a sign of respect to the person for accessing that spirit world.

I just wanted to mention, too, I never really did paintings for rituals. I did paintings of rituals, but I never did paintings for them. However, when I would go back to Cuba, I would see that my images were on the altars and on the walls. If people didn’t accept them, I would not have kept doing them.

I had an artist friend named Casper Banjo. He was an older African American man. He was shot by the cops in East Oakland because he had a fake gun. He had attended the Art Institute many, many, years ago. His work is in the Smithsonian. But he was here in Oakland, and he was part of a group of artists that I know. And I talked to him about these African portraits because I was like, I don’t know, should I be doing these or what? And he just said, do your work. Just do your work. Yes, do it. If he had said, I don’t think you should, it’s not really appropriate, I would not have continued. But he didn’t say that. He said, just do it. I have gotten a lot of encouragement along the way.

I have one other thing that I want to say before we end, and that might be the role of the outsider.

Thea

Yeah, I was going to ask about that, actually.

Sue

Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit about the role of the outsider. I think there is a legitimacy in a person like myself kind of delving deeply into the folklore of another culture. Like I say, the drums are my entry into it. I spent a lot of time playing the drums, learning the drums, getting blisters on my fingers. I got hepatitis in Cuba. I mean, I really paid for these rhythms, and that was my entry. But I feel like, as an outsider, I could look at situations and see them from a different perspective than a person who always lived there, who was always part of it, because it’s kind of like… how do you describe breathing? You breathe, so you breathe. But a person who never breathed before, they would have a lot to say about breathing or walking for the first time. Or I walk into a situation and I’m seeing things for the first time, it’s not like old hat. To me, everything is exciting, everything is thrilling. And I think that would be true of anybody who went into another culture.

I used to live in the produce market, and I used to think, what if a Cuban came and wanted to paint my life? What would they see? What would they find interesting? This might surprise me, the things that they would say, hey, wow, that’s cool. So I think the outsider does play a role in sort of observing and defining things from almost like the observer’s perspective instead of from the insider, because the insider might create an image that’s already understood, it’s already implicit. But for me, I’m seeing it with new eyes. So I don’t know. It’s an interesting question.

Thea

This is me speaking as a white science fiction writer, so take that for what it is. But in my experience talking with fiction writers of color and from other cultures, one of my takeaways is that so much of the conversation around cultural appropriation these days is about whose voices have been heard and whose work has been seen and who hasn’t. And so I’m thinking out loud a little bit here, but when we look at, let’s say, your work and then the work by the people who actually who live in Cuba and the people that you’re drumming with and those creators, is there a feeling there of wanting to make space for them or lift them up as well? Where do you see the role of your work in helping those other voices, who have been less heard, get heard?

Sue

If I was able to show my work in certain, you know, like, white situations — by the way, most of the time my work has been kept out of white galleries for the same reasons that theirs has, which is that white people just don’t see it. Or they’re afraid of it. They’re afraid it might be a ritual. They just don’t understand it a lot of times, so they can’t sell it or whatever. But I would try to make an opportunity for somebody that I knew in the Black community to come along with me to this space, to be there, to introduce this curator to that gallery and say, hey, you don’t even know this gallery. It’s right down the street. It’s a Black gallery. You guys should be connected.

And also bringing the drums and drumming into openings and bringing all the community that comes along with that. Like, we did have a big show at the Mission Cultural Center, and all the drummers came. My teachers from the Bay Area showed up, and they played. Introducing them to a place they had never been before. So bringing people in, bringing friends from that community and introducing them to one another, to the gallery director, so that maybe in the future that barrier might be broken.

One friend of mine suggested that I paint all the black musicians who have been trashed and whose contracts have been stolen, and I said no, you paint that. That’s not my subject. My subject is about living spirituality, which I never really intended to do because I myself am not a member of any of these religions. In Ghana, at our opening, the drummers looked at my paintings and they said, oh, that’s fetish. And I thought, fetish, that’s a word that almost feels like folklore. In Cuba, they use the word folklore. For us, folklore means something that’s dead. It’s historic. And I think Cuba’s government uses that word to take the teeth out of the fact that this is real stuff, people really living it.

Thea

But now that’s interesting. That concept of folklore versus religion, the difference in our culture is only like, is it alive or not? My own religious upbringing was neopagan Wiccan. And so I was always an outsider to, like, Catholic stuff. And I grew up in very Catholic areas at times. I had Mormon friends. But I was always an outsider. Things that so many people I’ve known would call myths or folklore — that was a living religion to me because I came from a tradition where there had been a very intentional effort to bring those things back as a living religion. Like my name even, is a Greek goddess, you know. So it’s a whole interesting dichotomy to me the way that those things get talked about and how you never hear Christian stuff getting called folklore or mythology, even though what’s the difference?

Sue

Exactly.

Thea

Yeah. It’s one of those things that tends to divide instead of bringing people together.

Sue

It’s not really folklore in Cuba and in Ghana. They were saying, oh, yeah, that’s fetish. We don’t do that here. I though, “Ohh, yeah, sure.” So they started playing. Oh, my God, they started playing and dancing their folkloric stuff and their traditional stuff, and there were other bands on the schedule, but these guys played for six or seven hours straight. They could not stop. They couldn’t stop playing. That is a trance state.

Thea

Is there anything else that you would like to share or address?

Sue

Just that it’s really interesting that we somehow hooked up again after all these years. I remember your writing in high school, and I remember, oh, my God, she’s such a powerful writer. I thought you were amazing. And I don’t remember how we got back to talking to each other again. Do you?

Thea

Social media? I think it’s mostly been social media.

Sue

Yeah.

Thea

I must have had your email at some point, because I remember your studio above the produce market. I came to visit there once or twice. Twice. But that was years and years ago, and then recently I found you on Instagram, and it’s yeah, I mean, I never forgot about you, you know.

Sue

I never forgot about you. So it’s really good that we hooked up again.

Thea

It’s been 23 years since I think we met, because my junior year of high school was 2000.

Sue

Time is interesting. Yeah. Very interesting. 20 years ago.

Thea

Yeah.

Sue

Anyway, it’s been great. Yeah.

Thea

Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me for the Journal and sharing so much about your art and your life with us.

Sue

You’re welcome.