Every Picture Has a Story

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Irene Suchocki Photography

“When I am shooting, I can completely lose myself in it. I lose track of time. My daily worries are a million miles away. I am completely focused on the moment. This state of complete immersion, focus, and excitement is so very thrilling to me and I am so grateful that I have found my bliss.”

Irene Suchocki is talking about photography, and the world is a better place because she shares that bliss. No, really, it is a better world: her landscapes and cityscapes are the stuff of which dreams are made. You'll find photos that could only exist someplace magical, and you'll find those that are perhaps less enchanted but no less enchanting. These are the ones that immerse us in color or light or natural subject. It can come as no surprise that Suchocki is also a sought-after wedding photographer.

The self-taught freelance photographer lives in Montreal but travels worldwide for the imaginative shots she creates. “I love to experiment with different styles and techniques, both in-camera and in my digital darkroom,” she says. She uses Photoshop in varying degrees.

“I get a lot of pleasure from getting the colors ‘just right' to my eye. At the very least, I do some color and contrast manipulation. I sometimes introduce textures as well. I almost see it as a form of painting, laying down layer after layer until I achieve a result I'm satisfied with. Photoshop is so very conducive to play and experimentation since any layer can easily be undone. I occasionally create composite images, such as my photograph of the hot air balloons over Paris.

“Faithfully capturing a scene is less important to me than finding that little bit of mystery, evoking a certain mood, or telling a story. Through my photography, I like to explore the ethereal, the surreal, the whimsical, the mysterious, and the beautiful. I like to consider each photograph a little poem for the eyes.”

Jerry Riach, Horizon Studio

What do engineers do when they leave the corporate world?

One answer lies in the art of Jerry Riach. An engineer for many years, he'd always been interested in Native American culture, and that brought him into the Raven Gallery in Minneapolis time and again to purchase a piece here and a piece there. One day, the owners told him the gallery was for sale...so he bought it. That was the start of his voyage into the world of printmaking and intaglio.

And a voyage it has been. Jerry studied drawing at the Edina Art Center and printmaking at MCAD and Highpoint Center for Printmaking as well as with Charles Beck. He continues to study printmaking techniques with regional artists such as Betsy Bowen in Grand Marais, Minnesota.

“My work is mostly representational, inspired by nature; nature is part of my structure,” he says. There is a precision about the lines of his prints that hints at his engineering past, but the colors he chooses and the stories behind each and every piece he creates reveal a soul with a far more musical side. “Each piece has a story behind it, and if you know the story then the piece really sings,” he says.

“Prelude, Fugue and Chaconne” is one such song. “I live on the shores of Lake Superior,” Riach says, “and it's a never-ending source of inspiration. The combination of rocks, waves, and clouds made this piece musical. And the intaglio print really felt like it provided a better feeling for the lake and sky and rocks in daylight.”

“July Moon,” a woodcut, is also an image of the artist's beloved shoreline. “This moonrise image is the way the lake looked when my youngest son was preparing to be married on the shore,” the artist says. “That day, he and I had just finished building an arbor for him and his bride to stand under during the ceremony. It's the way the lake looked that special night. I wanted to preserve that time, to show the moon shining on the lake, and how the arbor was backlit by the moon so brightly. It's a mood piece; the woodblock aspect of that piece makes it luminous.”

Joyce Yamamoto,

Horizen Studio

If the medium reveals something about the artist as a person, then Joyce Yamamoto's mixed media will tell you that hers is an open, colorful, intelligent and compassionate spirit.

The director of the YWCA in the Twin Cities for many years (and an English teacher before that) also once owned her own pottery studio in St. Paul, Minnesota, and loved throwing pottery so much she developed carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists and was forced to find other venues for her artistic expression.

“I have to get my hands in it,” she says. “It's the physicality of the materials; l love the sensual more than the cerebral aspect of it.”

The sensual is apparent in her work: The vibrancy of the colors, the mix of photography, paint, collage, and words all blend in a way that speaks volumes.

But there is an undeniable cerebrality to her work, as well. As a Japanese-American, Yamamoto is interested in preserving her culture. “It's also about who I am and who my people are; these are my perceptions of my inner world — the tangible and intangible combining through different mediums to say that we have the right to adapt and change to suit our inner emotions,” she says. “It's all about intuition.”

Yamamoto's “Self Portrait” is breathtaking in terms of the strength of that intuition. “‘Self Portrait' is a combination of stenciling, collage, and text in purple, greens, black, red chartreuse, and a rusty orangey-brown . . . many colors. It's a literal description of how I am on the inside.”

You may take the woman out of non-profit work, but you often can't take the non-profit out of the woman. Joyce Yamamoto is the chairman of the Grand Marais, Minnesota, Art Colony, where she recently took a majolica class. “It didn't hurt as much to do,” she said with a smile. “I'm back into it all with my hands!”