Susan Abbott
Marshfield, Vermont
Susan Abbott’s unique paintings are inspired by her passion for color, design, and the specifics of place, especially America’s small town and rural landscape.
MessageGrowing up in Washington, DC, Susan Abbott had an early passion for drawing and painting that was encouraged by her artist father. The textile arts of embroidery and quilting that she learned from her mother, along with time alone exploring neighborhood woods and streams, were favorite childhood activities that gave her a love of hand craft and nature and have informed her work as a professional artist.
Abbott began her formal art training during summers in high school studying life drawing at American University. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art, where she focused on figure painting and plein air landscape with Israel Hershberg. She graduated Summa Cum Laude and went on to receive an MFA at the Hoffberger School of Painting with Grace Hartigan as her advisor. She continued her academic studies with Mauricio Lasansky in the University of Iowa's graduate printmaking program.
Susan Abbott has been working as a professional artist since that time, exhibiting in galleries and museums around the country. Her landscapes and still life have been featured in many group and one person exhibits, including at Gallery K and Jane Haslem in Washington, DC, Tatistcheff Gallery in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Museum of Technology, Hood College, the Shelburne Museum, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Susan Abbott’s paintings are held in many private and corporate collections, and she has been a recipient of a Maryland Arts Council “Individual Artist Award,” a Vermont Arts Council “Creation Grant," and an "Art of Action" grant. Abbott's commission for Oprah Winfrey was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Her work has also been profiled in Artist’s Magazine, Washingtonian Magazine, Museum and Arts Magazine, Art New England, American Artist Magazine, Watercolor Artist, Watercolor USA, Baltimore Sun, and The Washington Post.
In recent years, Susan Abbott has been involved in organizing and participating in art collaborations with advocacy organizations to raise awareness about land use and environmental issues. In addition to her career as an exhibiting painter, Abbott teaches art workshops in Italy, France, India, the Caribbean, and locations around the United States. She lives in northern Vermont.
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Statement
I moved to Vermont twenty-five years ago for the most impractical of reasons, love at first sight. Driving through a small Vermont town for the first time, in the early morning and on my way to somewhere else, I caught a glimpse of a stream running through a big backyard. 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.
Decades later, I’m still passionately attracted to what I see here in Vermont, and on frequent painting trips to Downeast Maine, and travels across the country on two-lane roads: a work-a-day patchwork of small towns, quiet barnyards, empty factories, and Main Streets that have seen better days.
The Japanese concept of “wabi-sabi” helped me understand why I find these broken-down places so beautiful. Wabi-sabi embraces the imperfect, the modest, the natural, the seasonal, the mysterious. In small-town America, so often left behind by the modern world, I find wabi-sabi and the beauty of the ordinary everywhere I look.
Back in my studio, my love of design takes over. I invent color compositions, edit shapes, and allow abstraction to enter these paintings as I try to hold on to the changing, the disappearing, the memory, and the first glimpse.
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