Susan Beebe

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At Williams College, I was lucky to take a Life Drawing Winter Study course (one month, six hours a day) taught by the dynamic H. Lee Hirsche. I left Williams and enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and graduated four years later in 1981. At SMFA I studied Sculpture with Court Bennett, and Drawing and Painting with Donn Moulton and Nan Freeman. I also supported myself by art modeling at several Boston area colleges and schools.

In 1985, my mother, Barbara Beebe, and I moved to an island in Muscongus Bay, Maine, where she had bought an almost derelict Civil War era farmhouse. We lived there together for the next sixteen years, slowly restoring our house and working on our art.

We lived much as the original inhabitants had done – cooking and heating with woodstoves, lighting with candles, drawing our water with a bucket from a 100 year old well, using an outhouse, planting vegetable and flower gardens, and keeping chickens.

It was here on the island, living without electricity, that I began to learn about light, perceiving its changes through the seasons to be analogous to the tides of the sea, the flooding light of spring being high tide and immense night of winter low tide.

I began to paint landscapes in gouache. In 1999, with a grant from the Vermont Studio Center and help from a patroness, I began to paint again in oils, which I had not used since art school. My landscapes grew longer, as I attempted to evoke the feeling of being in the woods, being surrounded by them. As much as possible I paint in the woods, often with two canvases clipped together on two side-by-side easels.

In 2001, I married artist Jonathan Frost and moved to the mainland. I established my studio in Rockland, Maine, in 2003. The island is still my favorite place to paint, and I go back whenever I can!

About four years ago, I was inspired to begin my Boreal bird project, in which I am attempting to depict all 325 species of birds that inhabit the Boreal Forest of Canada, one of the world’s last great wildernesses. I want to raise awareness of the importance of the Boreal Forest because the policy decisions we make in the next decade with ensure or deny its future survival.

Website: susanbeebestudio.com