LA-born, Seattle-based painter Susanna Bluhm is the winner of this year's Neddy at Cornish Award in Painting, which comes with $25,000. She's also got a whole new series of paintings in a solo show at G. Gibson Gallery this month, titled Carry Me, after the Nick Cave song, which she was listening to while she made the paintings. You should go to her artist talk Saturday at 1. This is a teaser, in which she opens up about love, graffiti, her son's teacher, and what 25,000 big ones mean to her.

You make paintings based on pictures from your past. They're places you've been that have imprinted on you.

Yes, but the Yosemite project is about both: going there every year from LA with my family, and then returning last year with my wife and son. With Yosemite, I was haunted by the need/desire to go back after 15+ years. I couldn't stop dreaming about it. I was starting to feel desperate to go back; it was like my subconscious was demanding it. So I applied for the Artist Trust GAP grant and got it, and that's how Anna and Asher [wife, son] and I could go.

How do you pick which places not to make paintings of?

I'm examining that a lot right now. I'm thinking a lot about the role that attraction, desire, love, and pleasure play in the way I relate to place through painting, and painting through place. I had Matt Offenbacher in my studio a few months ago, and he articulated something that made so much sense to me and helped me understand my own work better. (One of the best studio visits I've ever had.) He talked about I'm treating the landscape as a lover, and painting as a lover. And the way that intersects with Western landscape traditions and the sublime is this kind of genre mash-up, where the distance that's usually between the viewer and the typically overwhelming/beautiful/threatening landscape isn't there. Instead of that safe distance, there's weird personal stuff, abstract painting and sex.

Tell me more about Happy Isles 1 (Hi, Sweetie). Words haven't appeared this much in your paintings before. This one actually reads "Hi, Sweetie" in candy-cane-like script across the painting.

When I was making that thing, I was feeling that way, feeling a "hi, sweetie" love for the landscape. It's me saying that to the landscape, and the landscape was talking back. Sometimes I could feel the ghosts of my own past peeking out at me through the landscape, and other times it was totally endearing, like this.

You don't paint on-site. You take photos, then paint later. Why work that way?

The picture is the starting point both for the composition and for my memories and associations of the place. Sometimes the photograph is still recognizable in the painting's composition and colors; sometimes the painting has gone somewhere completely different.

Why are you an abstractionist? Why not just paint straight landscapes?

I use marks and "symbols" across a wide spectrum from fully recognizable to completely abstract. For me, that middle area is the most interesting and challenging. The more recognizable things rub off on the abstract things, and the abstract things rub off on the things you thought you knew. Then you start to think that maybe that chunk of something is doing something. Green means something. Squishy means something. And it's the act of looking that makes something squishy; the act of looking generates meaning.

This is like something Seattle artist Emily Gherard said recently. She said at the end of every day in the studio, she either worries that what she’s making is too vague, or too obvious. She thinks of totally open imagery—the kind where what you see could really be anything—as a form of apathy, and she dreads that. But she doesn’t want to invoke the power dynamic of bossing people around by telling them what to see.

Exactly. I often think I must be hoisting this confusing mess of almost-information in front of people. For the most part I dread pure abstraction for those very reasons. With painting more than drawing, for some reason.

In Yosemite Meadow (the shadows moved across me), was that a more ghostly rather than an endearing moment?

Yeah. Often my paintings are really influenced by the music I’m listening to. I was listening to a Nick Cave album, The Lyre of Orpheus, and the song “Carry Me,” which is where the title of the show comes from. So the way I was feeling, and the song, and the more mysterious childhood feelings that pop up when you’re back in a physical place that you were as a child—it’s like, the shadows were there, and it was just such a coming together of my childhood self and my adult self and my own child.

What did you actually see? The original photograph is so obscured by the big shape in the center.

You can see the bare structure of the photo, but that was one of the paintings where stuff starts happening on top of it, rubbing up against it. That's something that happens in the process of painting. In that painting, there are some shapes and colors that come from these fake Indian feathers on these fake Indian headdresses my brother and I used to get in the Yosemite gift shop that they thankfully don’t sell anymore. The image of that fake feather comes up a lot, and there’s some texture in the painting that’s reminiscent of the feather and some of its colors, the red and the blue.

Am I crazy for seeing numbers in there? In the lower left there, that light green?

I do use letters but I haven’t used numbers. That actually says OK Kelly. OK is on the right side going backwards in cursive and then Kelly is on the left side. Do you want to hear the story behind that?

Yeah.

Well, basically I love graffiti because it’s all over our landscape and it’s supposedly in English and means something, and yet we all kind of take it for granted because we can’t understand it. So rather than meaning something, it becomes a signifier of meaning itself. And I just love the way we accept these symbols of meaning in the daily landscape that we occupy even though we don’t know the meaning itself. Also, there's the way graffiti, when it’s painted over, becomes geometric-abstraction graffiti.

My son, since he was a baby, he’s been fond of letters and the alphabet and he read really early. It's really interesting to see him because there are these developmental things he's ahead on and things he's behind on. His teacher is Kelly. ... And I feel like she’s helping me mother him, helping him find his way in the world. If she is saying he is OK, then he is OK. It’s like this 'OK Kelly' thing that keeps coming up in my head.

Are you focusing on anything in particular in your talk Saturday?

I’m really invested in the idea that people can enter into the paintings without hearing the meaning that I have for them, but at the same time, I haven’t created this secret world that I’m not going to tell anyone about. The meanings that are there, I like to talk about them as someone looking at them myself and I like the opportunity to look at them with someone else who may not be seeing the same things, and if they have questions about why something is there, I like going there with them. So I hope people have interesting questions.

Tell me what the Neddy Award means to you?

Oh god, it’s so huge. The money is huge in terms of what it can allow me to do [$25,0000]. I’ve never had that amount of money in support of something art-related. I’ve always struggled to get the means, or gone into debt. I went to Artist & Craftsman Supply in the U District and I spent like four hours there, and I just was so happy, it was like this profound happiness. I got all new brushes for the first time in 10 years and all these beautiful cadmium colors and cobalts. I got this gorgeous giant colored pencil set that I’ve always wanted. And then I went to Elliott Bay Books, because I realized how important the notion of travel and place is in my work, and I was really grappling with this freedom to travel and what that means. I got 20 books about travel, and theory around travel, and criticism of travel, and stories about travel, and it was amazing. And I have all this money left still that I get to travel with.

What are some of the books?

Several Rebecca Solnit books. A really interesting book about William S. Burroughs in Mexico [The Stray Bullet]. The big beautiful David Hockney book [A Bigger Picture]. Philip Guston's transcribed conversations. Those are a few.

Upcoming plans we should know about?
I’m excited to use the money to take some trips to LA and New York and look into galleries there. But I guess the show up now is really what’s happenin’ now.

At this moment you're at your day job, right? What is that?

I have a twenty-hour-a-week day job at ArtsWest as gallery director. It's a nonprofit theater and gallery in West Seattle. The show right now there is Tim Cross and Mugi Takei, and the shows run for two months here. Right now I'm in the process of going through all the applications for next season, which is really fun, because there's all these people I've never heard of, and their work is great.

Thanks for talking, and for your work. I'll tell people to go hear you Saturday.

All right. Thanks.