A Summer Painting

I'm working this summer on a commission--a large still life triptych that is a return for me to the "Dream Table" series, this time in oil rather than watercolor. I'll be posting vignette details of "Spring to Summer" as I work my way across the tabletop. On my studio desk you can see some of the bounty of art books and postcards I brought back from Paris a few weeks ago, which I'll be perusing frequently in the future for ideas, technical help, and inspiration.

NRECA Mural installed

My mural for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association's Washington headquarters has been installed, and is featured in a recent issue of "Rural Electric" magazine:

"The NRECA Collection's shining jewel spans the mezzanine of the main meeting room--a forty foot mural that , according to artist Susan Abbott, captures the inspiring story of America's electric co-ops.
Abbott's vision consists of ten separate oil paintings completed in her northern Vermont studio in half-size, then digitally reproduced and enlarged before being installed on-site. Her work features a road and power line crossing regions, landscapes and communities, from coast to coast, and incorporates farms, forests, mountains, churches, a schoolhouse, and a co-op line truck, all in bright, uplifting colors.
'The concept popped into my head as soon as I saw the space where it would go", Abbott relates. 'Because rural electrification was a New Deal program, I thought about how it unified people in rural areas all across the country...My parents were big supporters of President Roosevelt, and the New Deal was a frequent topic of conversation in our house. So I understood my project from the outset.' "

Art of Action project finale

The Art of Action finished it's year-long tour of Vermont with a July 17th exhibit and auction in Burlington. It's been an honor to be included in this ambitious and unique project that invited ten artists to weigh in on the future of our home state. You can see my series of paintings "The Elements of Place" here.

NRECA Commission Update

I'm at the Vermont Studio Center for two weeks, taking advantage of the long working walls and three good meals a day to finish my commission for the NRECA. The approach I'm using for this mural is "WPA Meets Post-Impressionism", combining a stylized landscape with vivid color shapes.

The paintings span from east to west coast, with each panel representing a different region of the United States. The architecture stands in for "the people" here, and every type of building represents a different population--rural, suburban and urban.


Power lines, a generation plant, and a dam also help tell the story of how our country was electrified. Bringing light and power to communities across the United States was a mission of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal", and very controversial in its time. It's hard to believe now that anyone would find it dangerous that our government would help a farmer put a light in his barn, or a housewife run an electric washing machine rather than use a scrub board, or a family listen to the radio in their lonely prairie home. But maybe our children will look back in fifty years at our fights over health care and other social programs, and wonder what the fuss was all about.

NRECA Commission

I've been commissioned by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association to produce a mural installation for the meeting room of their headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. The NRECA has its roots in President Roosevelt's New Deal program to improve the life and economy of rural areas. More than sixty years later the NRECA is still going strong, with more than 900 member cooperatives serving 42 million people in 47 states, and also programs in developing countries around the world.

My concept for the forty foot mural that will span the width of their headquarter's meeting room is to combine a narrative about the NRECA's mission with a design of shapes and colors that reads from all parts of the large hall.

Here's my first study, where I sketched out my idea: a road (with power lines, of course!) that wends through a stylized landscape of coast to coast America. Regional architecture represents the populations served by NRECA's member cooperatives.


I've decided to work with a limited palette of three hues (cadmium yellow pale, alizarin crimson, and prussian blue) for the paintings, so I can keep color integrated over such a large area. Three mixed primaries yield a surprisingly large possibility of colors:


Superimposing a line drawing of my composition over a photograph of the architectural niches in the room gives an idea of the scale of the paintings:


And here's a section of the watercolor studies for my eventual large oil paintings:



The project will be completed by November. Subscribe to Studio News for updates!

The Art of Action

For eight months I've been working on a series of paintings for the project The Art of Action: Shaping Vermont's Future through Art. Ten artists selected out of a pool of over 300 international applicants are creating suites of artwork that address Vermont's future. This unique project is using private funding (generously provided by Vermont entrepreneur and philanthropist Lyman Orton) administered by a public agency (the Vermont Arts Council) to address a vital social issue (where our state is heading). From creating my proposal last August to this final stretch of finishing my paintings, I've been inspired, challenged, and excited to be involved in the "Art of Action" project.


Informed by research conducted by the Council on the Future of Vermont, the artwork created for the Art of Action is designed to inspire Vermonters to achieve their vision for our state's social, cultural and political landscape. Elements in the council's Final Report guided the artists’ thematic choices and explorations.

My suite of paintings Elements of Place is an exploration of what for me defines the "essential Vermont": eight landscape features (Mountain, Forest, Field, Water, Road, Home, Farm, Town) shown in different aspects and seasons, that we see every day, and can easily take for granted.

These landscape features were also cited by Vermonters in Council on the Future of Vermont forums as important and worth protecting, and as symbolizing the values of country living and the “Vermont brand”.

I'm also depicting (in a panel that will hang with the "Elements" paintings) a possible future, what I hope is a "road not taken", for the Vermont landscape and way of life. As I say in my proposal, "How many hay fields, barns, gravel roads, and village general stores could vanish before we would be living somewhere that is no longer recognizable as the rural state we love?"


You can see more about the "Art of Action" proposal and the other artists here (click my picture to read my proposal). I'll be adding the entire suite of my completed "Elements of Place" series to my website later this summer--until then, you can see my paintings as they've developed on my blog "A Painter's Year". And the entire project with the work of all ten artists will be traveling the state throughout next year--and featured in a catalogue. Subscribe to future "Studio News" for details!