ART COLLECTORS S u s a n & D a v i d H o s t e t l e r
This is the second in a series about island art collectors and their collections.
BY LAURA RASKIN

INDEPENDENT ARTS WRITER


“Iguess it’s pretty symbolic. It’s

Susan and David Hostetler flank a painting by Michael Rich that hangs in their dining room. PHOTO BY MARK MATTOON

by the bed,” said David Hostetler, joking about the painting of a large, docile-enough looking white bull that hangs on his and his wife Susan’s cantaloupe-colored bedroom wall.

It had to be a joke, considering David has built a sculpting and painting career bowing to the female form and psyche. His only muse is woman — “goddesses” he calls them — drawing inspiration from Palestinian, Jewish, Egyptian and Greek history.

“I really am truly angry about what happened to you all in the history of things,” said David.

Making up for it in the best way he knows how, his goddesses linger as if it is forever cocktail hour all around the Hostetler home off Milestone Road. High ceilings and a loft-like living room showcase the goddesses and a collection of Japanese furniture and mostly modern paintings.

“I only sculpt women, so I guess a lot of what we collect is female,” said David, who has a studio and gallery on the Old South Wharf, managed by Susan.

Sherre Wilson Rae is the couple’s favorite island artist. Three of her dreamy paintings grace one of their living room walls.

“I love the lyrical, poetic quality of them. They’re so magical. You can really get into them,” said David. One is a flock of white birds, flying out of the canvas and shifting in a prism of light.

“That was on the cover of her catalogue (two years ago). I saw it first. I was just mesmerized by it,” said Susan, who warily asked if David liked it too.

He did.

“Sometimes we’re almost afraid the other person won’t like it,” said Susan, although it is over their most daring choices that the couple usually agrees.

A spare Michael Rich with only the most necessary strokes of color is another example. It hangs in their dining room, enough distance away from the Wilson Raes to give each their breathing space.

David and Susan are not wedded to Nantucket artists. “We choose what we like,” said David. “If you’re good at what you are doing, you change. Not every year are we going to like what an artist is doing.”

“When we see something we love, we discuss it. Some people need the whole set of baseball cards to be content,” he said.

Susan countered: “You don’t covet. I covet.”

The two come to art with different sensibilities, they explained. David taught art history and sculpting for years at Ohio University and was a jazz drummer.

Susan was a caterer in Boston when she and David were introduced by a mutual friend. “He thought we were meant for each other. I guess he was right,” said David. Susan does not come from an art background, but has developed a love for ceramics. Coincidentally, David began his art career as a potter.

“I’m not going to dismiss my eye, but I don’t have 30 years of training like he does,” said Susan.

There is an emotional reaction to art and a rational one, and neither one is right, said David.

“I think it’s a little of both,” he said.

The Hostetlers’ matchmaker knew what he was doing. David admits to not being able to imagine “retirement.” His art and being in his studio are inseparable from his vision of himself. Susan is the social one, with a head for business. She tries to coax David into nice clothes, he said, this day wearing what must be his own uniform – all black from bandana to chinos. Susan welcomes the “foodie” label and enjoys creating salon-like parties for their collector friends. She is reverential of David’s work.

David trusts her judgment, even if she has him eating “weird stuff like couscous.”

“We talk about decision-making,” said Susan about their dialogue before a purchase.

They discuss color and if a piece is immediately pleasing to the eye — not always a test for whether they will be able to return to it over and over again with pleasure.

“We both like the painterliness, not flat filled-in spaces that don’t engage you,” said David, referring to another of Wilson Rae’s paintings. This one is a room, but a fantasy room. Doors and windows have no solid bearings. It could be Moorish or contemporary.

“They’re not graphic exercises. They’re not easily explainable,” said David.

To balance out the testosterone of the bull in David and Susan’s bedroom is one of Susan’s favorites of David’s female forms – a seamless and curvy bust, made from wood that is like cake icing to the touch. It stands on a pedestal next to a 1914 German portrait of a reclining woman.

Susan wants to know what drives the artists she admires, she said, and that is part of the fun of collecting. That intrigue is inclusive of her husband.

“I want the artist to tell me what compels them to make that piece … I want to understand why he does what he does,” she said. “I still ask that question.”

“Really? You haven’t figured it out?” asked David.

“No, how could I? It’s in your soul,” she said.

Some of David’s most beloved heroes — Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore and Constantin Brancusi — are the ones he would like to fill his home with, if only he could afford them.

“They are all dead. They are my gods, my yardstick,” said David.

Although he makes most of his larger sculptures at his studio in Ohio where he and Susan spend winters, some of the largest of his figures stand in his back yard here as well as in his living room.

He used to live in a small Cape Cod saltbox off Miacomet Road until he met Susan. They had their new house built in the late 1990s and Susan took over the decorating, muting her taste for a bright, vibrant palette in order to accentuate the art they own.

“We make choices, even with our furniture, that are artful. These chairs I chose because of their lines,” she said about those in the living room.

“I trust her eyes. She’s got a really good set of eyes,” said David.

I If it were not for art collectors, the Nantucket

Historical Association might never have come to fruition in 1894.

In a panic not to see the island’s history be thrown out or taken off-island as trophies, the early secretary and curator of the NHA advocate that people save valuable “relics,” said Niles Parker, the Robyn and John Davis Curator of the NHA.

“There was a feeling that the island’s culture was rapidly vanishing,” said Parker. “It was a siren call.”

Generous groups and collectors continue to give to the NHA’s collection, and those acquisitions make up the current exhibit in the Peter Foulger Gallery upstairs in the Whaling Museum. Although an acquisition budget has recently been re-established at the NHA, the Friends of the NHA have spent 18 years acquiring objects the association would not have otherwise been able to purchase.

“Some really fantastic pieces have come our way,” said Parker. Other collectors, like Robert and Nina Hellman, have made a “promise gift” to the NHA of their collection of whale harpoons made by Nantucketers. The NHA will continue to collect into the future, relying on those who collect now.

While amassing art has recently been touted as the next market to tap in a lousy economy, as evidenced by the “art banking” arms of financial firms like UBS and Citigroup and documented by the Wall Street Journal, there is something to be said for simply buying what you like.

“You buy it because you love it,” said Kathleen Knight, owner of the Gallery at Four India Street. Knight is also a consultant, helping people to build their art collections by verifying authenticity and honest prices for those thinking of purchasing a Maurice Prendergast, Childe Hassam or John Singer Sargent.

Buying a Childe Hassam might be a sure thing: “I can guarantee you, you won’t lose your money,” said Knight. But on a lesser-known, local level, nothing is, she said. “It is an investment. It’s an investment in the aesthetic.”

THE ART OF COLLECTING

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