Suzanne Cerny

Suzanne Giuriati-Fellerman Cerny

A Jazz art Biography & ARTIST STATEMENT

January 22, 2012

Suzanne studied abstract expressionism in Cooper Union in New York City. Her mother, Jane Fellerman, attended the Art Students League in New York City and encouraged Suzanne to be an artist. Her father was from Naples, Italy. He painted copies of Impressionists and later for his restaurant, 'Leonello', in Ohio. Her maternal grandmother, Helen Fisher, was known for her designs for home made hooked rugs, and exhibited at the Armory in New York City.

About Suzanne's choice to sketch and paint musicians: “Music brings people together, and the variations of the jazz idiom is something that became very moving and inspiring for me in form and color”.

In 2007 jazz historian Ted Gioia launched a new website, jazz.com. Ted chose Suzanne Cerny as the first artist to design jazz illustrations for the articles submitted by over 30 writers. For this venture, Suzanne used digital painting exclusively, and submitted electronic images to jazz.com on a regular basis. Visit: http://www.jazz.com/gallery/suzanne-cerny

Her many works are in private collections in throughout the country and internationally. She lived, traveled and exhibited in Canada, Hawaii, Italy and Israel. In Central California she did public murals. She found on a way to design and execute public murals in any subject. Murals were painted with Nova Color, an acrylic paint of great durability, designed for outdoor murals.

Suzanne attended the High School of Music and Art on 135th Street and Convent Avenue in New York City. Suzanne became interested in the jazz that the classical music students were starting to play, and which was happening nearby in Harlem.

At The Cooper Union Institute in New York City her education prepared her for fine art and design as well as commercial art. Instead she began to travel throughout the United States, rafting and kayaking on rivers and finally settling in the Yukon Territory, Canada.

After five years of wilderness living in cabins, and working in a newspaper office, she entered and won an award of $5,000 in the mural contest for the Whitehorse, Yukon City Hall.

Her theme was the History of the Klondike Gold Rush. She completed the mural in 1967, the Canadian bi-Centennial year.

Deciding to re-visit the American west, Suzanne settled in San Francisco. She taught painting in the San Francisco Community College. She then became interested in helping a singer-songwriter to get exposure by locating him in gigs and radio stations. She helped to manage some of the events and saw how difficult it was for musicians.

It was after that experience that she found the jazz spirit in a record of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme – that someone had left on the street. The spiritual jazz poem dedicated to Love Supreme appealed greatly.

In 1985 Suzanne moved to Mendocino and started sketching portraits of jazz musicians in live performance upstairs at the Sea Gull Club. The primary group there was the Vince Wallace Quintet. She called this activity 'Drawing in the Dark'.

In 1994-97 Suzanne began sketching musicians using charcoal and pastel in a small store-front jazz club in Santa Barbara, CA. Many interesting jazz musicians drove to Santa Barbara from L.A. to play in the nightly Jazz Hall during those years, and over 300 8 x11 sketches in pastel were created while feeling privileged to hear such great music. Many drawings were signed by the musicians at the close of the evening, usually around 2 am. The musicians were openly interested in looking at the crowded display of themselves on the walls during their breaks.

Suzanne heard Ravi Coltrane on saxophone in 1997. Remembering her find of his father's music and explaining her interest to Ravi, she proceeded to photograph him in performance. After doing a couple of pastels from her photos and showing them to Ravi the next day, Ravi offered Suzanne a family portrait commission as a gift for Alice Coltrane for her 60th birthday. Ravi found photos of seven different family members for the painting, the one of John Coltrane coming from a magazine in Japan. The John Coltrane Family painting was featured in the brochure for the John Coltrane 75th Anniversary dinner in L.A., where the Coltrane family received the Gold Record award for 'A Love Supreme'.




Suzanne Giuriati--Fellerman Cerny
January 22, 2012

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