A Life in Landscape
Sue DeMichele loved life, and she loved the world around her. She looked to the landscape for inspiration and subject, and her artistic purpose was to capture and express moments of the beauty, energy, and promise of tranquility she found there. This exhibition presents a selection of work from the full spectrum of Sue’s artistic career: paintings of the sandy dunes of Nantucket, where her young family vacationed; the farm she viewed from her kitchen window on Jerusalem Road; the rocky ledges, shoreline, and marshes of Cohasset; the ice pond in the woods near her home; the islands, pines, sea, and sky of coastal Maine. As an artist, Sue made a connection with the natural images surrounding her, as they compelled her to interpret this beauty with paint and canvas, pastel and paper. Her choice of the New England landscape as her muse and subject gives this full body of work continuity and coherence.
For the first ten years, Sue worked in oils, developing her skill with luscious colors and vigorous brushwork. Her early paintings of Nantucket and Cape Cod dunes, remarkable for their muted hues, simple compositions, and quality of abstraction, begin the parade of vibrant oils and pastels that exemplify and illuminate her thirty-year career. The landscapes she loved become distinctively her own as she taps the expressive possibility of each scene and interprets her sense of the subject with an increasingly confident handling of her medium. The carefully rendered realism of the early oil of White’s Farm contrasts to the large later work of the same scene, which is refined in composition and expressive in a sure handling of paint and brush strokes, and in which color becomes light. A brief exploration of abstract forms painted in acrylic helped to enrich her sense of color and composition; although abstract, “Heart Strings” (1983) has the distinct quality of a landscape and signals the direction Sue would follow as a landscape painter.
In the late 1980s Sue began to experiment with pastels, focusing only on that medium, as her ability to work with it in limited time periods suited the pace and demands of her family life. She believed that using pastels helped her to develop a stronger sense of value and to cultivate both a playfulness and achievement of clarity of color. She continued to utilize the bold strokes and layering techniques of her oils. In “Rocks 3, 4, and 5” she uses the strong shapes of rocks to frame sky and sea and combines the strength and power of the natural rock forms with the delicacy of their colors to create a harmony with sea and sky.
Sue returned to her favorite medium—oils—in the late ‘90s, preferring the fluidity and strength derived from the paints and appreciating the sensual experience of using oils. She relished “the ease of the paint gliding on the surface, the building of texture by layering paint, and the response to the rich colors oil paint produces.”
In Sue’s Last Paintings—exemplified by a grouping of four small, intimate landscapes painted during the final year of her illness —she embraces and celebrates not only the qualities of oil painting but also her affection and affinity for the Maine coast: moments of bright days and cloudy skies. As she worked on her last paintings, Sue knew she had become the skilled, competent artist she had aspired to be thirty years before. Her pleasure in using paint is palpable. The landscape she loved sustained her inspiration and will to live and create and paint until the end of her life.
JoAnne Chittick
Penny Myles
Curators