Toni Reece: Hi there. This is Toni Reece, and welcome to the Get Inspired! Project for Berks County Living magazine. Today I have Suzanne Fellows with me. Hi, Suzanne.
Suzanne Fellows: Hi, Toni.
Toni: How are you?
Suzanne: I’m good.
Toni: Suzanne, take a moment and tell us a little bit about yourself.
Suzanne: I’m an artist. I work in several mediums. I’m a painter and a printmaker. I teach art. I teach drawing, painting and printmaking. I have a studio at the GoggleWorks, and I recently completed a project called “99 Elephants a Day” where I made 36,000 elephants over the process of a year.
Toni: Oh my gosh – that is really something! How do people find out about this project?
Suzanne: “99 Elephants a Day” is on Facebook. They are on Etsy, Twitter and Instagram. There’s a blog, www.99elephantsaday.com.
Toni: Great! Thank you for showing up for the Get Inspired! Project. Let’s go into it. What does inspiration mean to you?
Suzanne: Inspiration for me usually happens when I’m working on several ideas at the same time. Say you want to try a new medium and you want it to have this kind of look – you’re thinking about these colors, but you’re also thinking about a concept that might have nothing to do with painting. When several ideas collide together – that’s sort of how inspiration works for me.
Toni: Do you know when it’s happening?
Suzanne: Yes.
Toni: What does it feel like?
Suzanne: It’s really exciting.
Toni: Is it?
Suzanne: It is. To me, that’s where artistic ideas come in.
Toni: Could you be walking around outside?
Suzanne: Yes, you can be anywhere. Usually, it’s a project where you’re trying to get something started. Like when I was trying to do this elephant thing, and I didn’t know that I was going to do this until I had the idea. Usually for me it’s this combination of things that get layered. You keep thinking and going around and around, and finally they join up like puzzle pieces.
Toni: Is that the moment when you’re inspired, when they join up, or is it the whole process?
Suzanne: Yes, I think so, because then I get really excited. One of the things that happens with art is that you just run out of ideas, or you think you’ve run out of ideas, and you don’t know how to go forward. When I did this, I was looking for a yearlong project, because I can come up with seven paintings on any subject, no problem, before my interest fades and then I think, “Now what?” That’s how it works for me.
I’ve dabbled in songwriting, and it’s the same sort of thing. You have an idea for the mood of your song, and you decide what key you’re going to put it in and you’ve worked out some of the lyrics, but it’s not really working. All these things come together and you add some minor chords and figure out where the notes should go up and where they should go down, and it comes together.
Toni: Then when it comes together, there’s your inspiration.
Suzanne: Yes. I think that’s different from the way people traditionally think about inspiration. “I’m inspired to draw from nature.” But for me, the process of being a creative person just is a fact of being in the world for me. Am I inspired by elephants? No. I really care about them.
Toni: There is a difference.
Suzanne: Yes.
Toni: There’s a difference; however, from what you’ve said, the journey of the ideas that you came up with that came together for this project, that’s where you became inspired by the project, not so much elephants, correct?
Suzanne: Right. Although the elephant thing does go on all the time.
Toni: Let’s go on with that. How do you put that type of tapestry together here in Berks County? How do you put that inspiration into practice?
Suzanne: In this case, this is from the point of view of an activist, and I had this in the back of my mind for years – how can I be involved in helping to save what’s going on on this planet? How can I, from here, do something? Not that long ago I had children living at home and wasn’t going anywhere. That was part of it. How to make a difference from where you are.
Toni: So you were inspired by a story? Was it a story that inspired you to take action as an activist?
Suzanne: Yes; the numbers about the elephants. I had heard about the last Western Black Rhino, and I was writing a song about that when I came across this number. About 36,000 elephants died in one year, and I just couldn’t ignore that.
Toni: So what did you do?
Suzanne: I chewed on it and chewed on it until it came into a project. It’s sort of like a dogged kind of thing where you just keep going after whatever it is. That would be this project I just finished.
Toni: That’s phenomenal. What a great example of hearing something that really touched you, knowing that you wanted to make a difference, went through the process of piecing all the pieces together of what you could do to help, and then being inspired to start an amazing project.
Suzanne: Around the third or fourth day I thought, “Oh, I don’t really have to do this, do I?” But after I had the idea that I would do this, then there was still working out the details. Working out the numbers. Could I do 36,000 by April? No, I couldn’t. Crunch the numbers again. About a 100 a day. I know everyone’s heard that an elephant dies every 15 minutes, and this is the story I always tell, but it’s hard to keep your mind on that. One now, one in 15 minutes, one in 30 minutes, and then your mind just goes somewhere else.
Toni: It can't take it. It’s overwhelming.
Suzanne: It is overwhelming. The whole thing is overwhelming.
Toni: Who in Berks County inspires you?
Suzanne: A lot of people. One of my favorite people is Tom McMahon, because he’s always trying to knit together the people who are doing things. I am inspired by Hector from Sofrito, who is also working with community and trying to get people involved. The people at The Tea Factory. The people at the GoggleWorks. That’s a huge thing, to say the GoggleWorks, but there’s a lot of people there that are trying to make a difference too, working with kids in the schools.
Toni: What do you think the common denominator is for you about people that you find inspiring?
Suzanne: They want to help people or animals.
Toni: That’s fantastic.
Suzanne: I have a lot of friends that work with the Humane Society and things like that.
Toni: What would you like your legacy to be?
Suzanne: I would like my kids to know that you can make a difference – or anyone; kids that I come across that I work with at the GoggleWorks – that you’re not ever stuck. You might feel like you are stuck, but you can move things.
Toni: You are such a great example of that by what you’ve done. You really are. That’s a living legacy. They don’t have to be big, gigantic steps, do they?
Suzanne: No.
Toni: They can be very small steps, or part of the woven-ness as you’ve described it, of bringing ideas and people together and being part of that fabric to make a difference.
Suzanne: Right.
Toni: That’s amazing. Thank you for showing up for the Get Inspired! Project.
Suzanne: Thank you.
