SUSAN ABBOTT

Growing up in Washington, DC, I had an early love of drawing encouraged by my artist father and for textile crafts learned from my mother, as well as many happy hours exploring neighborhood woods and streams. These childhood activities gave me a connection to hand craft and nature that have stayed with me and informed my work as a painter.

In my eagerness to begin my art education I dropped out of high school to attend the Maryland Institute, College of Art, where I received a BFA and MFA. I’ve been working as a professional artist since that time, exhibiting in galleries and museums around the country and teaching art workshops around the world.

I moved to Vermont twenty-five years ago for the most impractical of reasons, love at first sight. I’m still attracted to all the ordinary things I see around me here–houses, barns, trucks, fields, mountains—and how they are made magical by ever-changing light and seasons.

When I paint in my studio from the references I gather on-site, invented colors and shapes take over and combine with my memory of the subject to create something completely new. My hope is that the paintings that result from this alchemy of the real and abstract communicate to the viewer something of my deep love for the familiar yet mysterious landscape of Vermont.