David Suter: Art And Ambiguity

Optical illusions and visual tricks, more the tools of a magician than an artist, are the weapons that David Suter wields in his exposure of duplicitous human weakness and stupidity.

With a few swift strokes of the pen, his drawings can nail the ambiguity of a political thought or expose a social injustice in a way that leaves no room for argument.

The drawings, which appear on the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times, Time, Harper's, and The Atlantic, have become so instantly recognizable that they are known as "Suterisms," which is also the title of a book of his work published in 1986.

Virtual Reality

What is not so well known is that from 1985 Mr. Suter was one of the early telecommuters on the East End. Working at a prolific pace from his house in Amagansett, turning out as many as three drawings a day and winging them off to editors by fax, he seldom had to leave his house.

"It was completely isolated," he said. "No one was around."

His wife, the painter Catherine Eldridge, had Amagansett Conklin ancestors and his three daughters, now 14, 12, and 7, went to the Amagansett School, but after some years he began to wonder if isolation was such a good idea.

"It was like virtual reality - I was in daily contact with people I hadn't seen in person for seven years. And to them, I was becoming almost an abstract personality."

Watergate Drawings

So, feeling the need to reconnect to the real world, Mr. Suter and his family now spend half the year in New Canaan, Conn., whence he can commute to New York City in person from time to time.

Growing up in Washington, D.C., with a mother who was an artist and a father who worked for the C.I.A., he was exposed to politics and art from the start.

"I always knew I would be an artist. As a child I used to doodle in class instead of paying attention to the teacher."

As one of his first jobs, The Washington Post assigned Mr. Suter to do courtroom drawings of the Watergate trial, and he continued doing straightforward political portraits for some time. The drawings, heavily cross-hatched and detailed, are very different from his present clean, succinct, minimal style.

Double Images

As he became more aware of the stories lurking beneath Washington's political surface, so he became more interested in the surreal or subterranean world that lay beneath the external features of the personalities he was drawing.

"The more I got into the political structure and saw its ambiguities and ambivalence," he said, "the more I became interested in the use of double images. And the older you get, the more you become aware of human tragedy and fatal flaws."

For a piece on Reaganomics, the President's face became an empty factory with unemployed workers. An office worker sits at a desk that is a giant hand, crushing him. A jagged line on an office graph showing the Wall Street slump continues off the wall and splits the whole building in half. The wheel of a car steered by a drunk driver becomes a liquor bottle and glass.

Understatement

By now a full-fledged Op-Ed artist, Mr. Suter moved to New York City in the mid-1970s.

"I'm interested in understatement as a style," he said, "and in trying to produce a feeling of inevitability, where all the parts fit together as if there could be no other way."

Asked how he managed to get so many ideas that he can turn out some 900 drawings a year, Mr. Suter said they just came out of the blue.

"It can't be calculated," he said, remarking that he had tried to program himself to get ideas in his sleep, but it didn't work. "I try to strike some kind of a balance between intention and happy chance."

1914 Cottage

Mr. Suter's house in Amagansett is one of the original cottages on the Bell Estate, built by Dr. Dennistoun Bell in 1914. Zigzagging down ever-smaller country lanes and a long, overgrown driveway, one steps back into the past upon arriving at the weathered house, surrounded by huge chestnut trees.

It was both an economic and aesthetic choice to preserve the house in its original condition. The family even lived for some years with the original generator, which would reliably kick in whenever the power went out.

It was here, in a small brick studio that looks like an English gatekeeper's cottage, that Mr. Suter first branched out from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional.

"I thought I might make some ornamental fences and gates. Then I turned to miniature gates. And then I realized that what I really wanted to do was sculpture."

These extraordinary works, rough-hewn sculptural fantasies from the same churning mind that produces the cartoons, have been exhibited twice by Morgan Rank in East Hampton and will shortly be shown in London.

"Working as an illustrator, you get tired of everything being confined to this flat plane. You want to break out of it, and sculpture's done that for me."

The vital component is the mirror - a way of achieving a double image in a three-dimensional format.

Done By Mirrors

"What sprang to mind was 'Alice Through the Looking Glass' and the expression 'It's all done by mirrors' - though that implies that doing things with mirrors is easy, which it isn't. There was also the aesthetic challenge of using something that might be considered in bad taste and changing it into something interesting," said the artist.

The two shows at Morgan Rank were sold-out successes. Adults became children again as they looked at a piece once, then realized that when they looked into the mirror incorporated in it, they saw something completely different.

A horse races past a mirror, but in the reflection it is going in the opposite direction. A man sits astride a rearing horse, staff in hand - but look down into the mirror and the staff extends, skewering a fearsome dragon.

In a mechanical piece, a large hand moving strips of wood becomes a sailing ship moving up and down on the waves.

Eighty percent of the effort goes into the idea and the planning, Mr. Suter explained, the technique itself being rather primitive and tiring - chopping the sculptures out of pieces of wood.

And as if this new avenue of self-expression weren't ambitious enough, Mr. Suter recently embarked on a project that is positively daunting in its ambition and the amount of work that will be involved before it is completed: a hand-drawn film of "Hamlet."

Mr. Suter has been fascinated for years by Hamlet's ambivalence, feeling a connection with the ambiguity of his drawings. He wanted to see if he could match up Hamlet's uncertainty with the multiple interpretations that are available (does Hamlet really see the ghost, or is it just in his head, for example).

A Daunting Project

Only three minutes of the film are completed - which is actually quite a lot, considering that each second requires 25 drawings.

And that is just the introduction, though Mr. Suter has also finished a couple of seconds of the soliloquy.

With admirable sang-froid, he agrees he has undertaken a daunting project, but, as he says, there's no deadline and he believes he can finish in a couple of years.

"I've always liked the idea of trying to see what you can do all by yourself," he said. "It would be nice if it turned out that Stonehenge had been built by just one guy over a long time."

A Different Person

Mr. Suter has a square, stocky build and a square, bulldog face. Quiet-spoken and rather unsmiling, he has the impenetrable glance one might expect of a man who has spent decades pondering life's ambiguities.

When your back is to him, you have the uneasy sensation that if you turned quickly, you might find a completely different person there, or a mirror image, or some object representing "the artist being forced to explain himself."

Or perhaps it is just that after a while the vivid imagination of this artist starts to rub off on those around him.