I was raised in Leadville, Colorado. Home of the highest mountains in Colorado. Beauty is embedded in my senses and the landscape was one of the greatest joys of my youth. In those days, I'd color and paint abstract pictures. Color was most important to me. I left home at 18 and moved to the Philadelphia area. My desire was to live independently, to be where it was green, and experience something new.
Art was shelved and I worked as a secretary, a paralegal, an office manager, and eventually had my own company computerizing law firms. After 18 years of work, I felt empty. A big hole deep inside that cried out for something richer, something elemental.
I walked out over the edge and began a long journey that was full of pain, destruction, renewal, and encounters with new places and people. I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for three years and fell in love with a city for the first time. In those years I began to draw again as a cathartic way to cope with difficult situations. Images would come to me as I drew.
I landed in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1993 with little left of the person I thought I was. Newburyport is where the Merrimack River meets the Atlantic Ocean. Just across the causeway is the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island. It is a barrier island about ten miles long.
After a few months I realized I needed to master the tools of making art in order to express what I felt and saw. So with no idea of how in the world I would do it, I applied to Montserrat College of Art in Beverly. Some of the happiest days of my life were in art school. At the age of 38, everything was so full of meaning and new discoveries unfolded with spectacular delight.
In the summer of 1996 I took a school trip to Viterbo, Italy - about 60 miles north of Rome. It was two months of exquisite experiences. During this time I began working on the arch image which is a recurring theme in my work.
Starting in 1998 I had the good fortune to spend a few weeks or a month each year at my friend's place in Lamole, Italy - about 45 minutes south of Florence. A wealth of my paintings come from the time spent in Tuscany. A part of my heart still resides there. At certain times of the year, I can get confused about where I am for I suddenly feel myself in a particular place, all the details as vivid as if I were there. The colors, the light, the smells, the temperature.
I've migrated from Newburyport to Rockport to Essex to Ipswich. Here in Ipswich is Crane Beach. It is another barrier island just south of Plum Island. This beautiful crescent formed by water is now so much a part of me I cannot imagine living anywhere else.
I still fall on my face, run into brick walls, tumble down slippery slopes. But when I get up, I write a poem, start a painting, and go for a walk on the beach. After a mile or so I stand and look all around me remembering that I am the sky, the sand, the water, the grass, and I need nothing more than that. Each element always itself, yet never the same. Thankfully.
photo by Sue Fish
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