Susan F. Cobin’s wonderland of art and whimsy

Stepping into artist Susan F. Cobin’s home is like being absorbed into an abstract painting.

It is a kaleidoscope of brilliant colors, shapes and forms, with the individual pieces appearing to spill onto each other but still distinctively apart. It is a sensory of color. If objects could naturally produce a smell, her home would be as fragrant as a flower garden.

I got a glimpse of Cobin’s presence before I knew her name. I was previewing items for an upcoming auction when I came across tables overflowing with whimsical and nonsensical pieces straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Since there were so many of them, I assumed this was someone’s collection. It usually is. They belonged to an artist, an auctioneer told me.

Cobin’s eye for collecting melds effectively with her artistic sensibilities. As I walked through her home recently, I could barely distinguish the things she made from the things she bought. She, her creations and her collectibles are playful, fun and imaginative. The artworks exude a laissez-faire milieu, form-free and unrestrained. She creates art, she says, for art’s sake.

“I never have anything in mind,” says Cobin, 75. “It’s just natural for me. It’s my passion. Half the stuff I can’t even explain. It just happens.”

She finds bits and pieces for her own art creations and items for her collection at flea markets, Goodwill, thrift shops, eBay and other sites on the web. She never uses objects in the way they were intended. She “re-vents” them, she says. She even has a system for web searching to ensure that she finds unusual pieces.

“I make up words to get the best stuff,” she says. “And I find stuff that I would have never found before.” She points to an ascending sculpture affixed with items culled from a Baby Boomer’s past. The sculpture sits atop a repurposed cat pedestal. “I think they’re the funniest animals you ever saw,” she says. She loves the piece for its “sheer comedy. I have a tremendous sense of humor.”

Each of the other rooms in Cobin’s home matches the tone of her living room, with its dark red sofa and a chair with a patterned throw. On this day, she’s just as colorful, wearing her favorite colors of red and black down to her necklaces. Red earrings dangle from her ears, a gift that her younger sister Deborah (she calls her Deb) picked up at a museum shop in Washington, DC, where she lives.

On one of the sisters’ excursions, Cobin came across a “ZAP” sign that now hangs in her living room. The word spoke to her. It was the same feeling she got when she first watched Batman and Robin on TV as a child.

“I used to love watching Robin and Batman. POW! POW! POW! POW! POW!,” she says, powerfully sounding out the words. “I just fell in love with the words. I fell in love with the graphics of the words. They were big. They were bold. They were exciting.”

That experience compelled her to study design in college. Cobin grew up in Wilmington, DE, one of two daughters of Family Court Judge Herbert L. Cobin and his wife Lillian, who was a member of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in the 1940s and later became an advocate for services for neglected children in the state.

As a child, Cobin copied cartoons. She read all of Erle Stanley Gardner’s books and now watches TV reruns of “Perry Mason” every morning at 9 o’clock. “I’m so in love with Paul (the private investigator on the show). He’s such a hunk,” she says.

She attended the P.S. DuPont High School and the private Pine Manor Junior College in Chestnut Hill, MA, near Boston, receiving an associate degree in 1966. She transferred to the University of Denver where she fell in love with art history. She took some painting classes in acrylics, which she eventually left behind for abstract creations. “I love to draw, and I have a different style,” she says. “I can’t draw figurative to save my life.” She no longer draws or paints.

For one class, she was required to submit a portfolio of works she’d completed during the semester. She had nothing to show because she had done nothing. “I drew my whole portfolio in one night. I looked around my apartment and took a cup and put paintbrushes in it and drew it. It was all semi-abstract. And my teacher said, ‘I am surprised at the work.’ She loved it.”

Cobin received a bachelor’s degree in architecture and design from the university. Being a woman, she could not find a job in her field, she says. She sold skis at a department store in Denver, although she did not ski (the store offered assistance).

In the 1970s, she was the program director in the Division of Continuing Education at Delaware Technical Community College in Wilmington. She also worked at the Please Touch Museum (where she bonded with the staff over the TV show “Seinfeld”) and then a gallery in Manayunk, both in Philadelphia. She also volunteered as an art instructor at a school for special-needs children and at a hospital. “I was always clowning around with the kids,” she says of the hospital position.

While in Manayunk, she got to know some other gallery owners. She acquired works by John Stango, a Pop Art artist in the Andy-Warhol mold who had dustups with the Walt Disney Co. over his use of the Mickey Mouse image. Among her Stangos was a painting of the comic-book characters Little Lulu and Tubby. The painting was among those sold in a special auction earlier this month by Barry S. Slosberg Auctioneers & Appraisers. The auction house noted that it was “believed” to be Stango. The signature, though, resembled his.

Slosberg was the company with which she consigned her artwork and collection – 95 percent of what she owned, she says. A lot of it was sold at auctions.

For collectors like Cobin, every piece has a story about how it was acquired. Here are some of her stories:

Totem-style cylinder of white mannequin faces:

“Do you know what that is? I can’t explain my mind. I just can’t explain it. I don’t know where it came from. I mean I know where it came from, but I don’t know how I created it. They’re men’s mannequin faces for eyeglasses, and I stacked them up. The top piece is a steam punk mask, man or woman. That’s one of my favorites ‘cause it’s so ridiculous.”

Radio with dancers, related to “Thomas the Train Engine”:

“You can tell I’m a child at heart. I don’t know when it was on, but I always watched Thomas the train. The conductor was Ringo Starr. He would put coins in the radio, and inside the kids would dance. I have Thomas the train in my bedroom. And I just love it. I can see them dancing. I got that at a gallery when I lived in Wilmington. It’s one of my favorites.”

(Ringo Starr was the first narrator of the show “Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends” from 1984-1986. He came back in 1989 in a spinoff called “Shining Time Station,” which featured a group of puppets performing inside the station’s juke box.)

Sculpture with cupcakes, lollipops and more:

Cobin was driving past a shop when she saw some material out front that she did not recognize. It was cork. She bought it, took it home and wrapped it around a stand to hold a sculpture that she built. The sculpture is decorated with a cacophony of figures, from butterflies to lollipops to cupcakes. “I searched and searched and searched (on eBay) for fake cupcakes. I found them and I kept going up and up and up. It was phenomenal.” The project took “forever,” she says.

U.S. Post Office lunchbox with Mr. Zippy on the side:

“I remember when my sister and I were young in front of our house, our bike didn’t work. So, the mailman said get a Coke. He poured the Coke all over, (and it) ate up all the rust. I love mailmen.”

Coiled elongated lucite mounted on stand, and Pez containers:

The designer of the coiled lucite is “a very very very expensive artist. It’s an umbrella stand, but it’s broken. If it was intact, … it would be worth a fortune.” The two Pez containers are unrelated: “I used to have a huge collection of Pez, but I gave it away. I love Snoopy.” (The designer of the umbrella stand was a California glass artist named Dorothy Thorpe. The piece is believed to be from the 1960s.)

Gilt birdcage with stiletto high heels:

“I used to go to Habitat for Humanity on a fairly regular basis, and it was just timing. They had just had a big banquet or something, and that was one of their centerpieces. So, I bought it immediately.” She doesn’t remember where she picked up the red shoes. “They’re heavy as hell,” she says.

Papier-mâché moose:

This sculpture is by an artist named William H. Stevens, a papier-mâché sculptor from New York. It is signed on the back “W. Stevens 87.” “He’s just beyond spectacular,” she says.

A mouse of remembrance:

Cobin never married but for five years was in a “magnificent” relationship with a man who died of a massive heart attack in her arms. On the windowsill in her living room is a small bird set between a full-figure W.C. Fields and a papier-mâché head of Kermit the Frog.

“I bought it in memory of him,” she says.