We reached out to Susan Abbott to get a glimpse into her creative process and the inspiration behind her beautiful works. Talking about the origins of her career as a painter, Susan Abbott shared that her father, a painter who had studied at Cornell University and in New York City, played a significant role in her artistic journey. Growing up, she was surrounded by his art books and watercolors that adorned their home. There were also plenty of art supplies around, including sample paper books from printers that her dad brought home from his work as a commercial artist (what we now call 'graphic design'). From an early age, she filled these books with her own drawings.
"I didn’t have formal painting classes until I was a teenager, but my parents always encouraged my art activities," Abbott told us. "My mother was very skilled with textile craft and taught me how to sew, knit, and embroider. Like most artists, I enjoyed making things and working with my hands as a kid. Like most children growing up in the 60s, I spent much of my free time outdoors exploring the creeks and woods of my neighborhood, and those early experiences in nature continue to inform my imaginative life and work as an artist."
By the time she was 15, Abbott knew she wanted to be a professional artist. She made the bold decision to drop out of high school, spending a year traveling across the United States, drawing, painting, and visiting art schools along the way. "I decided on the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, because it had an excellent painting program at a time (the early 70s) when it was difficult to get a strong fine arts education. I studied there for four years with Israel Hershberg and other accomplished realist painters and went on to get an MFA degree under Grace Hartigan. After graduate school, l studied intaglio printmaking with Mauricio Lasansky at the University of Iowa. Then, in my late 20s, I began the challenging work of making a career as an artist."
Susan Abbott's studio days are a blend of focused creativity and thoughtful planning. She starts her mornings at home, handling business tasks like gallery correspondence, working on current art projects, and preparing for teaching. Later, she walks a mile down a country road in northern Vermont to reach her studio, where she immerses herself in painting until early evening.
"In my studio, I have several paintings going at once, in various stages of development. I’ll do color and compositional studies first, both by hand on paper and in Photoshop. Once I’ve worked out where I want the painting to go, I’ll scale up my study and do an underpainting in Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue on the canvas to establish values and some ideas about temperature. Then comes the first pass of color—and many more color adjustments after that."
Nearly twenty years ago, Abbott moved to Vermont for what she describes as the most impractical of reasons—love at first sight. "Driving through a small town in the southern part of the state, in the early morning, on my way to somewhere else, I caught a glimpse of a stream running through the backyard of an old clapboard cape. Suddenly, I was back in my childhood, in a time before the creeks in my own town were culverted and the yards subdivided. The Vermont I saw from a car window looked like a memory of home, and I was hooked."
Two decades later, she’s still drawn to the beauty of Vermont’s everyday landscapes: small towns, dirt roads, village greens, barns, and back fields. For Abbott, these ordinary scenes are where landscape and memory meet, serving as the inspirations for her paintings. "While I paint, the abstraction of color, light, and shape combine with subject to compose a mood and a meaning. In these landscapes, the mood may be melancholy, the meaning ambiguous. Both mood and meaning in my landscapes—images of old houses, old farms, old towns, old trucks--have to do with age and time. Like many Vermonters, I value the old. Even when a barn has outlived its purpose, we respect its venerable presence and want to see it endure."
"The Japanese concept of 'wabi-sabi' has helped me understand why I find these old, ordinary, and sometimes broken-down places so beautiful. Wabi-sabi embraces the aged, the imperfect, the modest, the subjective, the natural, the seasonal, the private, the mysterious. In Vermont, I find wabi-sabi everywhere I look. In my painting, I find beauty in the ordinary, in the disappearing, in memory and the first glimpse."
For Abbott, a "sense of place" is about how a location makes her feel, and the success of her work lies in her ability to convey that feeling to her viewers. Paradoxically, achieving this requires her to focus not on specific subjects—like buildings, streets, or fields—but on the universal elements of painting that apply to all subjects. "Light, shadow, color, line, and shape are the language that allows my own internal, intangible 'sense of place' to be translated to the shared medium of painting."
You can follow Susan Abbott on Instagram and get the latest on her workshops and exhibitions by joining her mailing list at https://www.susanabbott.com/contact. Plus, discover her beautiful prints, which are available through Sebastian Foster.
