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So much of our daily reality comes directly from newspapers that it seems highly appropriate for a socially conscious artist to employ their printed pages as a medium, as does Susan Twardus, with her sculptures and drawings.

A recent winner of the prestigious Excalibur Sculpture Award, Twardus is a gifted sculptor who initially chose her medium not for its novelty value, but because she was looking for inexpensive materials with which to work. In the beginning, she ground up the newspapers by hand, but more recently she employs a food processor. She finds the paper more malleable for sculpting the human figure than bronze or marble, which she considers cold and unyielding. Her technique has something in common with paper mache; however, she makes her pieces permanent by coating them with heavy acrylic, then spaying them with wax to eliminate shine.

Although her primary concern, as with any serious sculptor, is with form, Twardus likes to use different newspapers from different places to give her work a sense of surface variety, and at times she has been influenced in her choice of subject matter by the editorial content of different publications. In one instance, she found an 1896 edition of the Boston Herald with an article about the suffragettes losing the right to vote and felt compelled to create a powerful and affecting piece about the plight of those pioneering feminists. Generally, Twardus begins work on a piece by making a preliminary drawing in charcoal. However, these are not mere sketches, but complete works in themselves. Indeed, they have a humanistic power and an emotionally charged quality akin to the drawings of Kathe Kollwitz, an artist close to Twardus in form and feeling. Like Kollwitz, Susan Twardus has a sympathetic awareness of the human condition. She obviously has strong feelings about justice, and how people are treated by society, and she invests her drawings, as well as her sculptures, with a moral force that comes across in her handling of her materials, as well as her choice of subject matter

Her movingly titled “Courage” (So go my wife and I)” for example, depicts a homeless couple toting all their worldly belongings in a shopping cart and a baby carriage. The woman leads the way, wheeling the stroller, which seems heartbreakingly symbolic of a young woman’s hopeful maternity; only this woman is middle-aged, and her carriage contains only the bundled rags of her destitution. Her husband follows behind, pushing the shopping cart that could symbolize affluence and the good life, except it too is laden with a rolled-up mattress and other pathetic personal effects. As its title indicates, in this drawing the artist celebrates the simple human courage that it takes to carry on in the face of defeat. Here, Twardus’ strongly drawn figures and command of subtle grey tonalities have qualities in common with Sue Coe, another socially concerned contemporary artist.

Another powerful drawing of a man’s head is created with charcoal on a double page spread of “Street News,” the newspaper distributed by the homeless in the streets and on the subway. Here, the craggy featured face is juxtaposed significantly with the headline that says, “You Can’t Judge A Book…..” Also outstanding is “This Old Man,” yet another powerful charcoal drawing of an elderly man in baggy clothes, forlorn and adrift on a city sidewalk, his head bowed, his cap held over his breast. It takes real courage to create an image so nakedly emotional in our era of fashionable irony; fortunately, Twardus has the talent and conviction to carry it off without resorting to pathos.

The humanistic qualities that come across in Susan Twardus’ charcoal drawings carry over successfully to her sculptures, as seen in “Yesterday’s Commodities,” an affecting image of another elderly man slumped amid a pile of financial pages, some of which he has wrapped around his shoulders like a blanket or a shawl. At one time he may have been a player, perhaps a banker or a stock broker, but now he is one with the discarded papers – yesterday’s news, so to speak. In another sculpture in the same series “Yesterday’s Commodities, #2,” another figure, this one is upright, is swaddled in financial pages like a monk. Here, there is a sense of how the elderly homeless, in their efforts to clothe themselves and find what makeshift shelter or comfort they can, often take on an eccentric appearance that sets them even further apart from the rest of us.

Not that all Twardus’ images are of the downtrodden. There are also upbeat pieces such as “Against the Winds of Opportunity,” which is a portrait of the news dealer that the artist buys her papers from. A solid middle-aged figure with the heft and lordly posture of Rodin’s sculpture of Balzac, perched on a pile of papers, he stands proudly and forthrightly hawks his wares on a gusty day with his clothing billowing out behind him. Also quite splendid in a similar manner is “Surrender the Winds of Time,” in which a wizened-yet-determined woman in a house dress wrestles with a newspaper blanket twisting in the wind, apparently attempting to pin it onto an invisible clothes line. In both of these pieces, the artist pays tribute to hard work and perseverance with characteristic straightforwardness. Also outstanding is a wall relief composed of several elderly women’s faces, their weathered features and babushkas lending them a timeless quality, as though they could inhabit almost any period in human history. This piece is wholly characteristic of the universality of her vision, which embraces a broad spectrum of subjects.

Twardus’ recurring use of the elderly as symbolic figures is another brave aspect of her art in a society so unabashedly youth-centered; she is reminding us not to abandon these people, who are, after all, our future selves. At the same time, her art is boldly celebratory in a time when so many other artists seem dispirited or cynical. She seeks to uplift us by celebrating the enduring human spirit in all its diverse beauty.

All of which makes Susan Twardus a valuable artist indeed and makes one certain that her work will endure long after fashionable irony has run its full course.

Howard Farber