ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, July 9, 1996 TAG: 9607090036
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MONETA
TYPE: PROFILE
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
Funny how things happen.
Twenty years ago, Susan Loy was a graduate student who didn't dream she was an artist. Then a friend gave her a calligraphy pen.
"That's what did it," said Loy, whose astonishingly detailed, handmade creations are the foundation of a thriving small Bedford County company - Calligraphy by Susan Loy.
Indeed, Loy's artwork has become so popular that she recently achieved a type of exposure Rembrandt would have never dreamed of: Fifteen of Loy's designs have been put on greeting cards.
The Sunrise company of Bloomington, Ind. - which sells greeting cards, stationery, writing paper, note pads and classy trinkets, including refrigerator magnets - has entered into an agreement with Loy to use her work on its upscale cards.
Loy's designs, previously available primarily through limited-edition prints that cost $15 to $150, may now be bought at greeting card outlets for a couple of bucks.
"We're excited about our relationship with Susan," said Sunrise spokeswoman Barbara Strother.
The company reached an agreement with Loy in January and began distributing the cards in May, Strother said.
"Her cards are selling extremely well."
Calligraphy is the art of fine handwriting. In such countries as Japan, China and Korea - where the alphabet itself is a kind of art - it enjoys a status comparable to painting and sculpture. Loy's own work entwines bits of literary text - William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, the Bible and others - with colorful watercolor designs. Her interwoven vines and flowers sometimes resemble the ornamental work found in the margins of medieval illuminated manuscripts. Her designs also owe something to the work of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement of a century ago - which sought to re-introduce handmade decorative touches to such workaday items as furniture, woodwork and wallpaper.
Loy's drawings are often complex - featuring circles within circles of mesmerizing, if eye-straining, detail - and take several months to complete. She averages a snail's pace six works a year.
Once a design is finished, it is sold through limited-edition prints. Loy and her husband, former Ferrum College business Professor Ron Ayers, sell them at art shows up and down the East Coast and by mail. Ayers left his teaching job several years ago to do marketing and public relations for the company.
It was the traveling that ultimately convinced Loy she had found her calling. "The first art show, I said 'This is for me. Gypsy artist.' I love to travel."
Loy's business operates from a building on her farm near Smith Mountain Lake. There, a staff of four does framing and matting and fills mail orders - while Loy herself works in an upstairs studio in the adjacent farmhouse. Her studio has an uninterrupted view of meadow and woods.
Loy studied American literature at Miami University in Ohio, then did graduate work in art history at Ohio State University.
In Ohio, the same friend who gave her the calligraphy pen once showed her a poem by English poet Gerard Manly Hopkins. The poem was "The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo" - and it contains the line: "Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver."
"It pierced me to the heart," recalled Loy. "I thought 'This is indeed what we should be doing.'''
She's been doing it ever since.
Loy said she had been approached before about lending her designs to commercial use. But she was never tempted, she said, until the Sunrise people called.
A Sunrise representative had seen her work at a show in Coconut Grove, Fla., and called her about it afterward, she said. Sunrise officials explained to her that their cards are aimed toward people who would send a greeting card - if they could only find one they liked.
Loy understood.
"I don't like the syrupy sort of message," Loy said. "As I learned more about Sunrise, I realized this was a company I could work with."
Strother, the Sunrise spokeswoman, said Loy's work fills a growing demand for cards with literary quotations. She also said the designs work well on square cards, for which there also is a growing market.
Sunrise is the world's fifth largest greeting card company and the leader in the "alternative" card market, Strother said.
Loy said it does not bother her to see her own work mass-produced on greeting cards. In the old days, she noted, artists could not sell thousands of copies of their work.
Instead, they painted their single inimitable masterpiece - and starved.
She has no problem, either, with eventually seeing her designs on the note pads, stationery and the other paper products Sunshine makes. After all, Loy said, why not introduce quotations from great literature into every corner of American life, to compete with popular culture?
On the other hand...
"When it came to refrigerator magnets," Loy admitted, "my whole being went 'Aaaaaaiiii!'''
Still, Loy knows what a luxury it is to feel such squeamishness, when most artists never make a living at their art.
And she is not complaining.
Far from it.
Said Loy: "Someone has to be the happiest person alive.''
LENGTH: Long : 117 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Susan Loy works out of a building on her farm nearby CNBSmith Mountain Lake. A staff of four does framing and matting and
fills mail orders - while Loy herself works in an upstairs studio in
the adjacent farmhouse. Her studio has an uninterrupted view of
meadow and woods.
2. Because Loy's drawings are so complex - circles within circles
of mesmerizing and eye-straining detail - they take several months
to complete. She averages six works a year.
3. Flowers are an important part of Loy's greeting-card designs.
Some of the flowers - such as these purple coneflowers - may be seen
in her own garden.|
DON PETERSEN Staff