yellowbusstudio.com

MARIKA SZABO

 One sign of a real artist, to my mind, is her ability to sit through the discomfort of not knowing where her art is taking her.  This period may last a week or two, or, as in the case of stained glass and intaglio artist, Marika Szabo, it may last a whole winter. “I know something is changing, but I don’t know where it’s going, or how I’m going to do it. It’s hard.”

Szabo has been developing as an artist since she first took potting courses in the late 60s. To earn a living, she first made functional ware, like cups and bowls, but eventually began to desire something more challenging and suitable to her temperament.  She abandoned ceramics and took art classes at Bishop’s and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. There she learned that she preferred to work in two dimensional-art.  On a visit to California, she discovered stained glass, and was immediately taken with it. She still loves to work in this medium.

When she first began to work with stained glass in the Eastern Townships in the 70s there was almost nothing in the way of stained glass supplies in Quebec, and she had to beg some pieces of industrial glass from a Montreal factory.  Now “the sky is the limit” in the choice of glass. “You can find glass of every colour, texture and surface.”  Most of her glass comes from Bendheim, New York, where they import German & French hand-made antique and semi-antique glass.  She likes to work with antique hand-made glass, but it is expensive and so she often settles for semi-antique, whose texture is artificially made.

“I spend a lot of time picking my glass. At home I place pieces of glass in my window to see how they work together.” Once she has the new work planned, except for the details, she sets to work. “The details work themselves out as I go along.” An average piece of stained glass will take her a week or so from start to finish

Szabo calls herself a minimalist artist. “I love to play with colour and line, and I find myself in tune with industrial stuff. They have a sculptural quality.”  Some such works depict old race cars and trucks in primary colours. “I also love found objects: metal, wire: anything that gives an interesting texture to my work.” She sometimes works with geodes—concentrically banded rocks lined with crystal formations of amethyst, agate or jasper; these are sliced into translucent pieces and embedded in the stained glass. Says Szabo, “With their infinite arrangements of crystals and subtle coloration, geodes evoke mysterious transformation. This change occurred over millions of years, which for me adds to their fascination.”

“I have a tendency toward geometric abstraction,” says Szabo. “Simplicity and order is an overriding concern: order through geometry and design… [my works] are about the real world in relation to the abstract world, the universal in the everyday.”

Lately Szabo has become fascinated with beetles of all sorts—with their fantastic metallic and jewel-like colours and clean graceful shapes.

In recent years, Szabo has undertaken the study of intaglio, or etched printing, as well as monoprints and mixed media.  This divergent art she does in her winters at Tucson, Arizona. She finds the balance of working alternately with paper and stained glass an ideal way to keep her enthused about both forms of art. “They translate back and forth,” she says. “I get ideas for my stained glass from what I learn and do in working on my printing, and vice-versa. When I work, I work flat out. So this way, after a winter of working on print-making, I come home full of enthusiasm for my glass art.”  Szabo’s printmaking has begun to win her prizes.  Her approach to intaglio is, like her approach to stained glass, minimalist, abstract and conceptual. She gets her ideas from her reading and from the natural world. Until she starts to work, she generally has no concrete ideas but, “something [will] start percolating up.”

Szabo is adamant that she can never rest on her laurels.  No matter how successful or popular a new venture or idea, no matter how long it takes for her to discover where her intuition will lead her next, and no matter if her buyers are less enthusiastic about her new explorations, she eventually has to move on. This is both the most difficult and the most exciting part of being an artist, says Szabo; “sometimes you just have to give up trying and keep the faith. Eventually something entirely new will emerge that is true to the self you are now.”  

Heather Paterson, media contact at  Studio Georgeville.com