ABOUT THE ARTIST

 SUE BOYDSTON

Mission Statement

Water has always been my muse. Streams, ponds, rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans have held a magnetic attraction for me since childhood. The Mediterranean, Adriatic, and Caribbean Seas, the Delaware River, the waters of the Hawaiian Islands, the Puget Sound and Olympic Peninsula, the Everglades and the Gulf of Mexico, have been inspiring my narrative abstract landscape paintings for many years. Recently, I have been traveling on a trawler navigating the Intracoastal Waterway from the Chesapeake Bay to Florida and some of the more remote south Florida waterways. While underway I create small drawings and watercolors. In my large studio I use these pieces as inspiration for my narrative abstract paintings in acrylic and oil on canvas.

While each of my paintings tells a specific story about a landscape space in time, it is transformed onto paper and canvas, personalized by notations in paint, medium application, color and design elements, and altered by my emotional reaction to the subject. My goal is to create a new two-dimensional reality while honoring the original landscape site. Frequently I develop my abstract narrative paintings in collage form or take a specific narrative and develop it in a series of pieces in several different mediums. Each landscape inspiration becomes a journey. My use of abstracted images internalizes the journey.

Biography

Born in 1945, I spent my first nineteen years in Pennington, New Jersey. I became an artist in the fifth grade when after an abysmal morning of mathematics the teacher brought out tempera paints, multi sized brushes, and large paper. I painted a sunset I had seen an artist paint on television the week before. I have been painting sunset, sunrises, and all matter of subjects, mostly in subtropical climes, since then.

I finished a degree in Art Education at Old Dominion University in 1968 where my husband was stationed in the Navy. I taught visual arts in public and private school systems in grade levels kindergarten through 12; Norfolk, Virginia, Washington D.C., Chicago, Ill, and Nashville, Tenn. I enjoyed working in inner city, culturally diverse, Title I schools and developed several art curricula for gifted and special needs children. The curriculum I used in a private program in my art studio in Prince George County, Maryland was endorsed by the public school system as a resource to parents of special needs students.

Thirty years as a military spouse, artist and mother of three complete with travels and adventures all over the planet, have been invaluable resources for my paintings. If you ask my children where they are from, they reply with, "when?" While living in Washington, D.C. I showed my work extensively at The Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia. In Honolulu I had numerous gallery, group and museum exhibitions. I received the Grumbacher Gold Medallion from the Hawaii Watercolor Society and The Jean Charlot Foundation Award for outstanding work in two-dimensional visual art. A few of my pieces were selected by the curator of the Hirshhorn to represent contemporary art in the state of Hawaii, 1985-1990. As I continued my travels I showed my paintings, drawings, collages, prints, and masks in galleries and group shows in Chicago, Ill, Nashville, Tenn., Norfolk, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Trenton, NJ, Honolulu, Hawaii, and some smaller towns here and there. My work can be found in numerous public, private and corporate collections.

In 2000, four months after moving to Naples, Florida I became a widow. I spent several years grieving, traveling and finding myself. I introduced the work I had been doing during this process in a solo show, REINVENTION, at SONA Gallery in Naples, Fl., January 2008. More recently I have been traveling on a trawler navigating the Intracoastal Waterway from the Chesapeake Bay to Florida and some of the more remote south Florida waterways. While underway I create small drawings and watercolors. In my studio in Naples I use these pieces as inspiration for my larger narrative abstract paintings in acrylic and oil on canvas. Some of these pieces were exhibited at the Osborn-Lizio Contemporary Gallery, 430 Bayfront Place, Naples, FL.

In addition to my large narrative abstracts I am also working on several large installation pieces on a grid of wood panels and canvas documenting through visual images my current journey with breast cancer and a celebration of survival.

I am currently exhibiting at the SWEET ART GALLERY, 2054 Trade Center Way, Naples, FL.