Minnetonka Artist Suzanne Carnes

Photo: Courtesy of the Carnes family

As Suzanne Carnes reared three children, her passion for art could only be seen with the painting easel in the family’s dining room. It was a small compartment of her life. As the kids grew and interest in her career waned, she explored many artistic styles, earned fine art degrees and produced a wide variety of respected pieces. It was then the purpose of her life.

That life was cut short by cancer last December. It ended before the 65-year-old Minnetonka woman could realize her goal of a gallery show. Her family has now fulfilled her ambition with more than 20 of her pieces on display at the Minnetonka Center for the Arts through the end of this month.

“I think it will be happy and sad,” says her daughter, Michelle Knutson, as she choked back tears. “Sad because she didn’t get to see it, but… all the kids will come back to celebrate it.”

After a divorce and before her second marriage to Pat Carnes, Carnes began taking classes at the Arts Center in 1989, and her stone-sculpted wolf’s head won best in show at the center’s juried contest the same year.

“It’s the Arts Center story,” says Roxanne Heaton, executive director of the Arts Center. “First, people come to find their voice—that’s what we pride ourselves on—and that’s what she did. And she did it quite well.”

As Pat and Carnes dated and spent in Minnesota and Arizona, he invited her to the studio of a female artist he asked to do a painting of his two Labrador Retrievers. The artist had a large work space in Rochester with many paintings in progress. On the way home to Minnetonka, Carnes started crying. Between sobs, the graphic artist said, “I want what she has.”

She later enrolled at Arizona State University to study fine art, created with bronze and wood cylinders, and earned two degrees, including a Master of Fine Arts in 2006. “She was attracting attention and wanted to have a show,” Pat recalls.

Art brokers told the eclectic artist she needed 20 pieces in a genre to have a show, her daughter says, and she set out to do it. She was making progress until an aggressive cancer diagnosis in December 2009 stopped her work. Radiation didn’t stop it from spreading in August. Come Thanksgiving, she had her work displayed for family at their Minnetonka townhouse. It was the closest she would get to her goal of a show.

Denying her passion for art came, in part, from the traditional expectations of her parents, says Pat. They, like his parents, came out of the depression and deemed a successful life as one that included a steady career with good compensation, not necessarily one rooted in love for what you do.

“Her family didn’t see the value of the art or how important it was to her,” Pat says. ”For her, there was this lifelong quest, and all she ever really wanted to be was an artist.”

To celebrate her coming out back in 1989, Pat, a psychologist and author of 25 books, wrote a passage to go with her award-winning wolf’s head sculpture. Here’s a portion of his words about Carnes, a mother wolf with no pups in the den:

“Now she wants the full stretch of the hunt alone to know her power. Her senses are keen. No shade of color escapes her. No nuance of her surroundings is unimportant. Mostly she has used her vision in the service of others—pack and offspring. Now she is called to see a new vision without distraction.”

Although art served as a small part of her life as a young mother, her daughter witnessed her passion. “She was the happiest when she was working with her art, creating things,” Knutson says.

Carnes’s lifelong friend and fellow artist, Mary Brown, knows how much a show meant to her, and if they had one last conversation, “She would say, ‘That’s a dream!’” Brown imagines. “After starting at the Arts Center, going to Arizona and coming back, she is probably saying, ‘Hey, I did it! I got a show!’”

&

Suzanne Carnes’s exhibit at the Minnetonka Center for the Arts runs through June 30, the day the Minnetonka artist would have turned 66 years old. To learn more about the show, call 952.473.7361.

Share this Article

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•