With swirling colors, artist relays her recovery from schizophrenia

By Rachel Irwin
of The Chronicle staff

During high holiday services as a young girl, artist Susan Weinreich remembers opening up her prayer book and finding the following passage: “Just like the clay in the hands of the potter, so are you in My hands.” (Jeremiah 18.13)

“I was doing pottery at the time,” Weinreich recalled during an interview last week at the Grand Avenue Club, where she was exhibiting a large selection of her oil paintings, pastels, and charcoals as part of the organization’s 11th annual Grand Event on Thursday, June 21.

“And I had been making art since I was old enough to hold a pencil … but that was my first awakening [related to] why I make art. The greatest artists are motivated by God and spirituality.”

The inspiration she felt that day at synagogue has stayed with her — through her diagnosis with paranoid schizophrenia while studying sculpture and glass composition at the Rhode Island School of Design, through the many years she spent in the “war zone” of her illness, and especially through her remarkable recovery and subsequent career as an artist whose work has been reviewed in The New York Times, among other publications.

“What’s so significant about being here [at the Grand Avenue Club],” said Weinreich, who grew up in Stamford, Conn., and who currently resides in Mount Kisco, N.Y., “is the connection made between the creator and the viewer, especially for someone who deals with illness.

“When someone is suffering or in pain, there is isolation that takes place. To be able to make a connection is where the healing begins.”

Rachel Forman, executive director of the GAC — an intentional community for those who have experienced mental illness — agrees.

“Here was this attractive, talented woman who looked nothing like the image constructed [of schizophrenia],” Forman explained. “Her art is gorgeous, interesting, and intriguing … and she shows that recovery can take place. She went from being immobilized to being a woman who’s living life.”

Carrying the flame

Weinreich has indeed transformed from the “caged animal” she was during the worst years of her illness.

“I had hair all over my body…. I was overweight and I had stopped bathing. I was extremely paranoid and always running from something. It was like two mirrors facing each other — a boundless, never ending nightmare.”

During this nightmare, Weinreich lived for a few months in St. Louis, where she spent a lot of time wandering around the lobby area of Washington University. It was there that she met a family of Lubavitch Jews who offered to take her in.

“They rescued me,” she said. “They came, packed all my belongings and brought me into their home. I helped them cook cholent and I went to all kinds of things in the community.”

She left the family when they wanted to send her to Israel, but she returned to the East Coast Shabbat observant and with a backpack full of kosher dishes and silverware.

“I’ve moved in and out of observance throughout my life,” Weinreich said. “But I’ve always been very proud of my Judaism. The spirit of why I make art is rooted in the sense of passion and dedication that is greater than myself.”

Her growing awareness of the Holocaust as a young adult, Weinreich added, was also integral to her development as an artist.

“I remember standing in front of the eternal flame in my synagogue and thinking, ‘Why did all these people die?’ … They were all artists in my eyes. They had carried the flame so far and were forced to put it down. My job was to pick it up and carry it further, to continue the work of people before me. [That idea] propelled me through my young adult life and continues to now.”

But Weinreich was trapped inside an illness that very nearly destroyed her ability to create art at all. She spent about 10 years on various medications with debilitating side effects, all the while moving in and out of hospitals and halfway houses in Rhode Island.

Process of recovery

That changed in 1979, when her mother found a new hospital called Four Winds in Westchester, N.Y, where she was treated by the hospital’s director, Dr. Samuel C. Klagsbrun.

“That’s where I started my road to recovery,” Weinreich said. “That was the first time I was told I had schizophrenia, and in the next breath he [Klagsbrun] said I could recover.

“The doctor cuddled me, called me bubbeleh … he was my mother and father. I was so regressed to an infantile state, I couldn’t engage in therapy, I couldn’t sit still. He said, ‘If you can’t speak to me, then draw.’”

Although she had made black and white woodcuts during her illness, she “couldn’t sit still” long enough to do much else. At the hospital, she started to draw again, and eventually began to emerge from the darkness that had enveloped her for so many years.

“It was love, and speaking to the person inside the illness,” she said of her recovery, noting that her medications remained the same. “It was a long process.”

After she was well enough, Klagsbrun gave her the keys to a concrete building on the hospital grounds for use as a studio. Despite the austerity of her surroundings — she had a propane gas stove for heat and used old ECT (Electro Shock Therapy) tables for her work — Weinreich said that “color happened.”

She had her first show of 35 pastels at the state mental hospital in Wingdale, N.Y.

“[The hospital] was surrounded by barbed wire. I remember looking out the window and seeing my grandmother from Park Avenue.”

The color that “happened” so many years ago is still very much a part of Weinreich’s work. Her paintings are saturated with swirls of it, and she loves to create portraits (her GAC show includes one of Klagsbrun) because “each one tells a story and has a history.”

Another theme laced through her work is that of “the kiss,” which she said is “the simplest form of human connection.”

After years of being ill and thinking she had to suffer in order to create art, Weinreich now believes that great art comes not from angst, but from the commitment one puts into it.

“Not everyone is going to do what I do, but everyone has their own capability of giving back. It comes from commitment and perseverance,” she explained. “I make art … to bring healing and light to people. I don’t want my art to be inaccessible.”

She has remained in close touch with Four Winds Hospital, returning occasionally to work as a volunteer. Klasgbrun even gave the sermon at the bat mitzvah service Weinreich decided to have upon turning 40, some 12 years ago.

“I taught myself Hebrew and studied for a few years. I did the maftir, the haftorah. Three hundred people came.”