|
Susan Beebe American I decided I was going to be an artist when I was 5 years old. I drew constantly through childhood and adolescence, created many paperdolls with scores of costumes, illustrated my favorite stories, built a cardboard GI Joe clubhouse with bunks and handsewn sleeping bags, and made lifesize sand sculptures of Greek gods and goddesses at the beach. When the tide washed them away in the night, I said they'd gotten up and walked into the ocean. I loved the woods and spent much time playing in them and climbing trees, with my two brothers or alone. At Williams College, I was lucky to take a Life Drawing Winter Study course (one month, six hours a day) taught by the dynamic H. Lee Hirsche. I left Williams and enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and graduated four years later in 1981. At SMFA, I studied Sculpture with Court Bennett, and Drawing and Painting with Donn Moulton and Nan Freeman. I also supported myself by art modeling at several Boston area colleges and schools. In 1985, my mother, Barbara Beebe and I moved to an island in Muscongus Bay, Maine, where she had bought an almost derelict Civil War era farmhouse. We lived there together for the next sixteen years, slowly restoring our house and working on our art. We lived much as the original inhabitants had done, cooking and heating with woodstoves, lighting with candles, drawing our water with a bucket from a 100 year old well, using an outhouse, planting vegetable and flower gardens, and keeping chickens. It was here on the island, living without electricity, that I began to learn about light, perceiving its changes through the seasons to be analogous to the tides of the sea, the flooding light of spring being high tide and the immense night of winter low tide. I began to paint landscapes in gouache. In 1999, with a grant from the Vermont Studio Center and help from a patroness, I began to paint again in oils, which I had not used since art school. My landscapes grew longer, as I attempted to evoke the feeling of being in the woods, being surrounded by them. As much as possible I paint in the woods, often with two canvases clipped together on two side-by side easels. In 2001, I married artist Jonathan Frost whose work can be seen at www.jonathanfrost.com . We moved to the mainland. I established my studio in Rockland, Maine in 2003. The island is still my favorite place to paint, and I go back whenever I can! Since 2002, I've been involved in three environmental battles with the Maine Dept. of Transportation over its wanton cutting of trees in Warren, Camden and Gorham (see "The Elephant Tree.") My husband and I have organized two shows of many artists that address political and environmental themes: "Remove Tree: A Commemoration of the Trees of Route One, Warren, Maine," and "Portraits of Conscience," an Amnesty International sponsored show calling attention to nonviolent political prisoners around the world. |
