Femme Visuale: A Tribute to Susan O’Hara

A bald figure urgently leans her head outward, cocked at an angle, looking intently at me through somewhat squinted eyes. I’m taken aback by this stare-down, but have fallen under the spell of O’Hara’s emotive ceramics.

Susan O’Hara passed away December 21, 2015, but her legacy still lives on in the artwork still on display at the Wandering Eye Gallery in Ybor City, one of the many galleries that represented her through the years. I met with her husband of 40 years, Joe O’Hara, to get some insight on the late artist.

Born in Belgium in 1935, she was the daughter of a Jewish diamond dealer. A week before the Nazis invaded where they lived in Antwerp, her father bought a car so they could flee to southern France; they lived there for about a year before shipping off to Cuba.

“When her father left, the only thing he took with him besides the car was a bag of diamonds, and he used those to bribe people,” O’Hara explains, “and that’s how they survived.”

They lived in Havana for five years; when O’Hara was 11, her family immigrated to Miami as a pit stop on the way to their final destination: New York City. This is where she immersed herself into the arts when she studied at the High School of Music & Art, and later at Hunter College.

For 19 years, her sculpting was only part time while she worked as an executive secretary to the head of the ophthalmology department at Yale Medical School.

“She would work in the evenings, weekends, or whenever she had some spare time to do it in addition to running a household,” O’Hara says. “Sue was totally driven. When she got up in the morning, the first thing she thought about was sculpture, and she went to bed at night thinking about what she was going to make the next morning. That’s the way she was in terms of sculpture; it was just the focus of her life.”

With her simple, bold, organic forms, her work links to modernist sculptors like Barbara Hepworth, especially her pierced forms.

“When I met her, she was doing much more realistic work, and she was just evolving her style. She was constantly working on new forms, trying to find new ways of expressing herself. Her two biggest influences were Pablo Picasso, after his cubist period, and Henry Moore. She described her work as ‘modern primitive’,” O'Hara says.

Ceramics is a hands-on practice, but even with other mediums, Susan had to be extremely physically engaged with her pieces.

“Clay was always her first love. Later on when we moved to Florida, she experimented more with other forms. She did alabaster and some wire pieces. It was getting very difficult for her in the past few years because of arthritis, but she loved it,” O’Hara says.

She used different hand-building techniques for constructing her pieces, including the coil method, slab building and “paddling” technique where she used a wooden tool to pat the clay into her desired form.

“I didn’t watch her a lot; we always gave each other space to work. Sometimes she would ask me to look at something for my opinion, especially with glazes because Sue was not good with colors and I was. But she was way beyond me when it came to sculpture, so I was like a neophyte trying to give her advice,” O’Hara says with a chuckle, “I always told her that, but she still wanted my opinion.”

Inspiration for her work seemed to have stemmed from just the act of making the work, by just starting something and seeing where it led her.

“When she did a piece, she usually knew what she wanted, but she didn’t do it from some grand idea or theory of art,” O’Hara says.

Though she considered herself a self-taught artist without a formal art education, Susan took classes at HCC as an academic audit.

“She wasn’t really a degree student. She mostly did independent study and was just learning new techniques. That’s what she was using the teachers for, since she already knew how to work with clay and a kiln. Whether she kept the techniques up afterwards was irrelevant,” O’Hara says.

The surface treatment of her works is remarkable. Sometimes you can't tell what the material is because it imitates wood in some situations, and rock in others.

“She didn’t get into glazing very much because it required multiple firings, and we didn’t have a kiln at that time. She would glaze with shoe polish, and she would warn people, ‘Don’t leave this in the sun,’ because it would melt. This was a technique she learned in high school; it gives it a wood look. She did that for many years because she didn’t have glazing opportunities,” O’Hara says.

When she received an Individual Artist Grant from the Arts Council of Hillsborough County around five years ago, she was able to use those funds to purchase a kiln to experiment with glazing more.

“She found glazing somewhat frustrating: she used the painting technique rather than a dipping technique, so it wasn’t always easy for her to apply it smoothly,” O’Hara says. “Some things came out pretty weird, but some of it was good. I told her, ‘Don’t worry about it, so what if it’s an accident? It still looks good. Who’s going to know?’ She was really beginning to become accomplished with it, but it took a little while.”

While in Florida, Susan became enmeshed in Tampa’s art scene. She was a member of the Ybor Art Association before becoming a founding member of the Wandering Eye Gallery, where she worked shifts every Sunday.

Besides her devotion to the arts, she also had another passion.

“I don’t think you could truly write about Sue as a person without knowing the other side of her love, which is greyhounds,” O’Hara says. “The two of us have had greyhounds for 20 years, so we’ve been heavily involved over the years with greyhound rescue and adoption. It was a very important part of our lives.”

Her sincere passion for all of life shows in her work, which appears in the candid, autobiographical emotions in her figure’s expressions. Wave of Desire is one such piece, where the figure seems to writhe and twist with pleasure.

“One thing I think I can tell you with pretty much certainty is that each piece reflected her mood at the moment. It was really a projection of herself. I could tell when I was doing something wrong, or that she was unhappy, just by looking at what she was working on. You could look at a piece of hers and pretty much read into what her mental state was at the time. It kind of helped me understand my wife,” O’Hara says with a smile.

She changed her style over the years, but her later works were a conical body form with a head on top, where she would sculpt different faces.

“Her confidence grew over time, and that helped her experiment because she was confident about what she was doing. Previously, she felt…not inadequate, but… just not where she thought she should be in terms of her skills. In retirement, Sue would spend at least a half of a day on her sculpture. She normally worked on two or three pieces at a time because she was to impatient to wait for the clay to dry,” O’Hara chuckles.

To support making her larger sculptural pieces, she also made smaller, more affordable and functional faces she called her “Lafaloonies.” Some have open heads to serve as a phone or remote control holder; others act as office pen holders, and have startled looks on their faces at the pencil stuffed in their gaping mouths. She struggled between making what sold well and what her heart told her to make. For the most part, her art seemed to defy the artistic preference of the masses. 

“Her work is much more attractive and appealing to other artists than it is to the general public, I would say. Every single artist we’ve known has loved her work, including me. I think a lot of artists look past the form, deeper into the art itself. They look for the empathy, compassion, or whatever emotions they see in it. For a lot of other people, it’s not understandable, I guess.”

It’s hard not to feel the reflection of humanity in her piece Quiet Thoughts. Head tilted backwards in introspection, Susan clues us in on what kind of woman she was, and the kind of compassionate world she wished for.

“She was a very open, accepting person; she almost never judged people,” O’Hara tells me. “To me, Sue was a perfect woman.”

As he guided me through Susan’s garage studio, O'Hara reminisced about his favorite pieces long sold.

“I would always tell her, ‘Why do you have to sell all of the pieces I love?’” he says.

One of the pieces he wishes he still owns is one of Susan O’Hara’s most striking pieces, called Inner Voice. A small, hollow head nests inside a larger head, both with similar, delicate, open-mouthed expressions on their faces. The inner voice is small and mild inside its shell of an outer voice, which is confessional. Though O’Hara didn’t talk much about her own work, her powerful, emotive work does the talking for her.

To see more of Susan O’Hara’s work, visit Clayheads.com. Additionally, Ybor City's Wandering Eye Gallery still has some of her consigned work.

Urban Dictionary defines Femme Fatale as “a woman with both intelligence and sex appeal that uses these skills to manipulate poor helpless men into doing what she wants. May cause death.” Keeping in line with this concept, the women highlighted in Caitlin Albritton's "Femme Visuale" series aims to highlight local women artists and show off some lesser-known talent that's been hiding in the shadows. In the art world, if it ain't big and loud, it ain't being seen (looking at you, Koons). Art as a grand spectacle leaves little room for modest, sincere, or quiet voices, especially women's voices. And I promise, we won’t bite. 

This article appears in Jul 14-21, 2016.