The art of art appreciation: Festival artist Susan Hoehn’s museum series appears on the Pageant stage this summer
By MARRIE STONE
Susan Hoehn has mastered the masters. The 11-time Festival of Arts (FOA) exhibitor not only paints faithful portraits, intricate interiors and lush landscapes, but as her chosen genre requires, she replicates many of the artistic geniuses of our time – Jackson Pollock, Jeff Koons, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Wayne Thiebaud, Mark Rothko, Claude Monet and countless others – all at miniature scale.
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Photo by Jeff Rovner
Susan Hoehn is showing in FOA Booth 104 this summer. This is Hoehn’s 11th summer at the Festival. Her work appears on the Pageant stage and in the FOA Permanent Collection.
For more than a decade, Hoehn has been working on her popular museum series, which includes dozens of oil paintings depicting scenes from inside some of the world’s most renowned museums, including several California institutions. The paintings are exactly what Pageant of the Masters (POM) Director Diane Challis Davy needed when assembling this year’s show. She selected three of Hoehn’s works from the Laguna Art Museum (LAM), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Broad to open this year’s Pageant.
Gold Coast: Treasures of California takes audiences up the California coast to visit some of our state’s notable works of art. From San Diego to Sacramento, attendees are treated to 39 works from 16 locations. But three of Hoehn’s works set the stage.
“As we were considering the many roles museums play, we thought Susan’s artwork was the perfect way to introduce our theme,” Challis Davy said.
The curtain rises on Wayne Thiebaud’s 2022 exhibition at LAM. Hoehn’s 30” x 30” oil painting, entitled Local Legend, reproduces three of Thiebaud’s works, including Morning Freeway (2012) and Display Cakes (1963). Hoehn includes a mother and son enjoying the paintings. Note the faithful reflections on the varnished museum floor, the shadows cast by the frames on the white walls and how the overhead spotlights illuminate the works.
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Courtesy of Susan Hoehn
“Local Legend” showcases the work of Wayne Thiebaud which appeared at the Laguna Art Museum in 2022
“Thiebaud is a favorite of mine,” Hoehn said. “In fact, I just took my grandkids to his exhibition (in San Francisco.) I put them in front of his cakes. I’m working on that now and hope to finish it before the end of the show this summer.”
The museum series began roughly a dozen years ago when Hoehn’s husband was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Museums became a place for her to escape and quietly sit with – as she describes these works of art – friends.
“It’s interesting how you deal with your husband dying. You either curl up in a ball or you find this fearlessness,” she said. “I took a risk. I didn’t know whether these paintings would sell, but it was something I really enjoyed. I loved experimenting with something completely different.”
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Courtesy of Susan Hoehn
“Blue Dog” showcases the work of Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog (Blue)” at The Broad
Hoehn is a born artist, having excelled at painting since childhood and describing herself as the “token artist” in class. She received her art degree from UC Berkeley, studying under American painter Joan Brown. “This was the ‘70s at Berkeley, so it was a lot of self-interpretation and breaking the norms. They encouraged us to find our voice, see the world and not copy other people’s work.”
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When Hoehn married and began a family, she hoped her art would achieve some commercial success. Her landscape paintings of the California wine country soon found their audience. Seven galleries across Northern California now carry her work, and she’s amassed an impressive list of collectors.
The museum series, however, allows all of Hoehn’s many artistic talents to sing. “I love painting interiors and I wanted to find a subject matter that would be fun to paint,” she said. “There are endless sources of interesting compositions. When people don’t know they’re being watched, the way they stand, or lean in, or the way they look is so interesting. I just watch. I’ll take photos when I see something I like.”
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Photo by Jeff Rovner
“Standoff at The Broad” showcases the work of Andy Warhol’s “Elvis” at The Broad
Hoehn isn’t alone in her fascination for this subject matter. London-based artist Marta Morientes, who paints in a crude lo-fi and graphic style, has also tackled Warhol and Koons. Photographers Stefan Draschan (People Matching Artworks), Andy Freeberg (Guardians) and Elliott Erwitt (Museum Watching) all share the love of juxtaposing art with its audience.
Erwitt wrote in Museum Watching (1999): “I am a dedicated people watcher who loves to see art and art watchers watching. Museums provide irresistible visual feasts of science, history, art on canvas, in sculpture, in buildings that are themselves art. Blending with displays, spectators provide the human scale, thinking, judging, having fun, feeding sensibilities. It makes fine hunting for a furtive photographer on the prowl.”
But photographing museums is one thing. Painting them is quite another. Unlike Morientes with her primitive cartoon style, Hoehn’s oils are faithfully realistic. She doesn’t simply copy a Pollock. She learns to paint like Pollock.
Hoehn traveled to both the MOMA and The Met in New York to study their Jackson Pollock paintings. “I just sat there and figured out how he did this,” she said.
Hoehn’s Pollocks have proven very popular over the years. “I don’t know what it is about Pollock, but it attracts a lot of people. It’s very masculine. It can be violent. It can be crazy and manic, but it’s just so interesting. There’s so much more to the process than throwing paint on the canvas. That was challenging.”
As with all the masters, Hoehn made careful study of Pollock’s paints and process. “I figured out what his base was. Where his underpainting was, and then the layers. I taped off my whole canvas except where the painting was going to go. Then I did it just like Pollock, only I did it on a mini scale using toothbrushes and smaller tools. Over the years, I’ve gotten better at doing the Pollock.”
Now duplicate that process for David Hockney, Claude Monet, Andy Warhol and dozens of others. Add in complicated interiors with their plays of light. And don’t forget the people, who are generally rendered from behind.
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Courtesy of Susan Hoehn
“Women Viewing a Pollock”
“I choose paintings that I really love,” Hoehn said. “I love Monet and the abstract expressionist painters. A friend sent me Gustave Caillebott’s Paris, A Rainy Day. I loved the way they dressed and how they were holding their umbrellas, walking through Paris. It had great perspective. But I didn’t have time to go to Chicago to take photos of it. Sure enough, that exhibition came to the Getty. I jumped in my car.”
Unfortunately, after making the trip to the Neue Galerie in New York to photograph Gustav Klimt’s Woman in Gold, Hoehn was turned away. No photographs allowed. “That painting has been so taken advantage of through the years. Austria wouldn’t release it to the family. (It was seized by the Nazis during WWII). When they finally got it back, I think they just wanted to preserve the integrity of the painting. So, I get it,” she said.
Fortunately, there’s plenty of artistic candy for Hoehn to enjoy. She even painted herself into one of the works that appears on the Pageant stage.
“I was at LACMA with my boyfriend who asked why I don’t put myself into my paintings,” Hoehn said. “I loved David Hockney’s mid-century modern pool scenes and that whole era of pop art with Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. So, I posed in front of it.”
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Photo by Jeff Rovner
“The Artist at LACMA” posing with David Hockey’s “California Copies from 1965 Painting in 1987” (alongside A-Yo’s “Rainbow Heart” and Roy Lichtenstein’s 1963 piece “Cold Shoulder”)
Now for the Pageant magic. Once you view Hoehn’s paintings in her booth, watch them grow from small-scale to life-size. Thanks to the scenic artistry of Erika Bradberry, Hoehn’s 30” x 40” LACMA piece expands to 11 ft. x 20 ft. on the Pageant stage (a process worthy of its own article).
Off-stage – and back in her studio – Hoehn says her work is not only a source of creative fulfillment, but a personal lifeline. After undergoing treatments for breast cancer last year, painting offered an ideal distraction.
“The thing I take away from going through that is how grateful I am to have my painting,” she said. “I enjoy the process. It’s an escape, it’s how I make my living, it’s brought me friendships. When I’ve gone through difficult times, it’s always there for me. Then when somebody buys a piece, identifies with it, and sees what I saw and why I painted it…wow.”
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Photo by Jeff Rovner
To view more of Hoehn’s work, visit her in Booth 104 this summer at FOA
For this one-of-a-kind artist, the accolades just keep coming. While driving down Laguna Canyon Road this summer, notice The Artist at LACMA hanging outside the FOA grounds. Earlier this year, Hoehn’s painting Interior of St. Paul’s Cathedral was selected to be part of the 114th Gold Medal Exhibition. Last year, Huntington Museum, Pasadena was purchased by the FOA as part of their permanent collection. And the best may still be yet to come for this artist working at the height of her career.
You can see more of Hoehn’s work at FOA Booth 104 this summer and, for additional information, visit her website here.
