Franklin artist Sue Pratt Sheridan makes art “because I have to,” she says. “I believe we are all born with a need to express ourselves visually,” she says.
Creating art has been a lifelong interest for Sheridan, who was named a signature artist with the Rhode Island Watercolor Society, has been active in the Franklin and Foxboro Art Associations as well as the Franklin Cultural District initiative. She has won numerous awards for her work, which has appeared in local and national juried exhibitions.
Although Sheridan received her BFA in Fine Arts from UMass Amherst and subsequently taught high school art out of state, a move to Connecticut during a time of few teaching jobs ended her teaching career, and her art went on hold, aside from occasional workshops and painting, until she retired from her day job as a management analyst for the Social Security Administration 16 years ago.
Finally, Sheridan had time to focus on her passion, creating art in a variety of mediums.
“I am actually working now mostly in pastels and oils,” says the artist. “For years, I concentrated on watercolor, which is a fabulous medium, but one of the toughest. With watercolor you can get effects that you cannot get with anything else – fluidity, luminosity and transparency.”
“I try different things,” says Sheridan. “I don’t like to rule out anything. I think every medium has its own expressive qualities. You can build up passages in oil—you can glaze, you can correct mistakes, things you can’t do in watercolor. And pastels, is a medium that is very direct and responsive. You don’t have a brush in your hand. You’re holding a piece of pigment made into chalk and choosing (not mixing) your colors. I like that because I like to draw and do figure studies. I like to work with charcoal also; you’re not burdened by holding the brush or how much (paint) you have on the brush even before you make your mark.”
Sheridan says she’s motivated to capture “an atmosphere, a feeling, the way the light hits something, pulling forms out of a fog, or out of an early morning frosty landcape where things aren’t quite visible, yet.”
New England, says Sheridan, provides a wonderful source of inspiration with a variety of “seasons and terrain, the foliage, the atmosphere, all of that is such rich territory for an artist to explore,” she says. Much of what she paints has to do with light, “on a still life setup, on a landcape, on the side of someone’s face. In the early morning sun or late afternoon sun, when the light falls on objects and makes them glow.”
Sheridan says she is also fascinated by busy city scenes of people walking. “I like the shapes they make, the shapes of figures walking closely together but not knowing one another,” she says. On her travels to Tuscany, for example, Sheridan enjoyed painting people against the backdrop of the medieval hill towns.
The art isn’t in the landscape or the subject itself, says Sheridan, it’s rather in “how you see the world, how you observe. I think, as I’ve painted more and more, I’m less into copying reality or trying to make something look exactly like what it is and more into a painting that feels like what I saw. The subject is filtered through my perceptions and my aesthetics.”
Sheridan says she has thoroughly enjoyed her journey covering many “brush miles,” as she is spending time, not necessarily on the same things over and over, but “doing something that excites you, that lights you up. I wake up in the morning, and I am excited. I can’t wait to get down (to her studio). I always have loads of projects lined up and things I want to do.”
Through January, you can see Sheridan’s work on the walls of Jane’s Frames in Franklin Center, and Sheridan routinely shows her work at the Next Door Gallery in Mansfield and at the Post Road Art Center in Marlboro. A second location for the Muffin House, of Medway, will open in mid-January in Mendon, and Sheridan’s work will also be shown there.
Online, you can see Sheridan’s work at the Franklin Art Association website, and you can visit Susan’s studio by appointment at [email protected] or (508) 533-1917.
Artist photo.jpg (no caption, make this first, then others as they fit please)
Issue Date:
January, 2017
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