Featured Artists: Suzy Papanikolas & GP Merfeld
Featured Cover Artist: Suzy Papanikolas
Suzy Papanikolas’s paintings grab your attention immediately. While visually stunning with their vibrant colors and textures, they are most remarkable for their sense of drama and the window they open into the emotions of those she paints. In some paintings the dancers may be excited about a coming performance, in others they might be anxious about how they will do. On some canvases a group of dancers will be relaxing and sharing a laugh. In still others we see native Hawaiians in traditional costumes performing ancient ceremonies of the culture.
Suzy has a great love for Hawaiian and Polynesian cultures, participating for many years in gatherings such as the Merrie Monarch Festival and Tahiti Fête in Hilo, and the International Canoe Carving Festival in Lahaina. She is a close friend and admirer of Tahiti Fête’s Pua Tokumoto and her husband Dwight, and through the Tokumotos she became interested in Tahitian dance and music. Pacific Patterns, chosen for this issue’s front cover, was inspired by a drummer at the Tahitian dance festival in Hilo. Suzy also had the honor of working with master carver Ray Bumatay at the International Canoe Carving Festival. Ray asked her to carve a story board for him on the canoe he was making for the Merrie Monarch Festival in 2019.
This amazing artist comes from an equally amazing background and set of life experiences. Growing up in the artists’ colony of Laguna Beach, California, she came from a family whose lives revolved around art. Her mother was a watercolorist and sculptor, her father founded the Laguna College of Art and Design. After graduating from the University of Texas, and from San Francisco State University, Suzy moved to Sonoma County in Northern California to raise her children on a farm, where she tended her chickens and goats. She also played in an all-woman band, The Righteous Mothers.
In addition to her involvement in farming and music, Suzy also studied psychotherapy and became a primal therapist in Los Angeles and in Berkeley, where she also worked as a painter and faux finisher. She painted a series of large murals in the Bay Area including one at the San Francisco International Airport. Coming from a long line of builders, it is not surprising that she developed carpentry skills, and for some years she worked full time in Berkeley as a carpenter.
She has lived in Europe and Mexico and traveled widely through the South Pacific, looking for a place to settle in the islands. She came to live in Hawai‘i, taking part in the canoe festival in Lahaina for seven years, carving story boards and printing pareau for the carvers while she learned carving from Cook Island master carver Michael Tavioni. After several years on Maui, where she helped design, build, and manage a bed and breakfast retreat center in Makawao, she bought land in the hills near Pāpa‘ikou on the Hāmākua Coast. There she designed and built a house for herself where she lives with her partner Richard Tillinghast, a poet and travel writer. Here they grow avocados, papayas, and bananas and have their own chickens.
Her paintings are meticulous in their attention to the details of costumes, the dancers’ and performers’ tattoos, their leis, and the decorative patterns of their clothing. “I like to catch people when they’re really involved in what they’re doing,” she says. “I see the pensive looks on dancers waiting to perform. I’ve gotten to know many kumu as I’ve visited the cultural festivals.” When asked where she goes for inspiration she replies, “Usually any place where the locals hang out, or cultural events like canoe festivals, hula, and rodeos, or traveling to the South Pacific. But really, just being right here in this inspiring place, surrounded by all these beautiful people, I feel blessed.”
For more information: papanik.com
Table of Contents Photographer: GP Merfeld
GP has the distinction of being the only artist whose work has graced Ke Ola Magazine’s cover twice, and now is being featured a third time for our table of contents image. GPʻs passion for the subjects he loves to photograph obviously resonates with the editoral content of the magazine! His work has been exhibited in several galleries throughout the islands and he is currently working on a retrospective to be published in a series of books. For a full bio about GP, see our May–August 2020 issue.
For more information: gpmerfeld.com
