Susan Mallory Sherman
Across the Brook, Oil on archival panel
In nursery school I remember looking very carefully at two finger paintings I’d made, a monochrome in purples and a bright multicolor one. I could tell the purple’s swirly values made a prettier picture, but that multicolor was more exciting, despite or perhaps because of the danger that too much mixing would turn the colors to brown. I also made many figurative sculptures in clay. I’ve been painting pictures and working with clay ever since.
I dislike the expression “self-taught.” All artists are self taught: we teach ourselves—somehow—to see relationships and we learn ways to work with pencils, paper, and color. Otherwise we’d never be good enough to come to the attention of mentors and teachers.
My formal painting instruction began in 6th or 7th grade when I began studying with two Rhode Island painters, Ed Connelly and Richard Grosvenor, before attending RISD, where I majored in ceramics. I loved the intensity of the technical training in ceramic technology.
During my junior year I studied at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, Scotland. They taught a very classical approach to painting and sculpture with an emphasis on value studies. Equally influential was a Josef Albers-based color class at RISD where we mixed paint to match Coloraid papers. Later, as a graphic designer in the pre-computer age, I honed those skills painting gouache mock-ups of book jackets on acetate. I learned to mix almost any color with almost any palette. Putting all these methods together in practice forms the technical base of my work.
By attending shows and being impressed by the variety and vibrance of the CAA community.
The Golden Bough; Hinton Amper Beech Forest, Oil on archival panel
Over the last forty years I’ve been the art or creative director at several children’s book publishers. I have had the pleasure to work with many local and international artists. I am regularly a juror for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and speak frequently on children’s books, art, and design at RISD, Simmons, and Maine College of Art, among others.
The artist can show what is important. We all know the adage: a picture is worth a thousand words. A picture can be immersive: a dreamscape to live within, a place that sparks ideas in the viewer.
Oil painting; it has the widest range of color possibilities. I love the feel of it and the way it can be thick or thin, opaque or transparent.
I work from sketches done on site and then refine compositions and color in the studio. I try to capture a moment in the life of a place: but it’s an idealized moment with the goal of capturing the zeitgeist of that landscape.
Three Pines, Ausable River Afternoon, Oil on archival panel
Presently I am working on a series of place-based paintings I am calling “forest stories.” Many are set on those edges where the terrain changes from one thing to another: forest to cultivated land, for instance.My pictures often use paths of water and light to make visual sense of the apparent chaos of trees and rocks, sky and water.
To work larger and more expressively.
I visit museums, galleries, read newsletters, look at work online, and use libraries.
Too many to list!
I have a small collection of pieces by book illustrators and friends.
I currently have three paintings in the Adirondack Artist Guild Juried Show, up through April 19th in Saranac Lake, New York.
I have a solo show, “Into the Woods,” opening April 4th at Maud Morgan Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts, that will run to May 4th.
I am represented by the Martha Corscaden Barn Gallery in Keene Valley, New York. I will have pieces in a group show there, opening August 8th and running through October 12th.
SEE MORE SUSAN!
Website: www.smsherman.com