Beebe & Beebe
Mother & Daughter Show

The launch of our 2012 gallery season is a beautiful show with the work of two artists who have painted together their whole lives.

Barbara Beebe and her daughter Susan have been creating art for decades, sometimes apart, but often together.  Their work shares a joyousness of color and freedom of spirit as well as a love of place.  Barbara’s paintings travel far afield, to Italy, Mexico, Costa Rica, Spain, and the artist’s native North Dakota, while many of Susan’s focus on Maine’s Friendship Long Island, where in 1985 the pair settled into an old farmhouse.  “The island is my favorite place to paint,” says Susan.  Susan trained as an artist at Boston’s Museum School, but Barbara is largely self-taught and came to painting after a highly successful career as a jewelry designer (something she still does); she started drawing as rehabilitation after injuring an arm in a fall on the island ice in 1987.  Since then, both Barbara and Susan have worked together in artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and shown their art in numerous exhibitions throughout the Maine Midcoast and elsewhere.  Susan is also a well-known and popular teacher of art, both with children and adults, as well as an equally well-known professional gardener and environmental activist.

 Susan and Barbara’s subject matter in this exhibition ranges from striking still lifes to intense florals and evocative landscapes.  Barbara shows a dozen works on paper in brilliant gouache, while Susan exhibits sixteen oils on canvas, as well as two linocuts, one of a Cooper’s hawk with nestlings, and the other a dramatic large image of a snowy owl in flight.

Some images are cropped; click on the thumbnail for the full image.