"This past winter started out at the same time I was personally experiencing a ‘wintering’ in my art practice. Influenced by the ancient Chinese almanac which divides the year into seventy two 5-day periods, I began a sequence of painting about spring while in the dead of winter. These 22 paintings are a record of the week by week inevitability of change occurring on the land behind my house. Although I live barely 2 miles in from the coast, I still reside under the clammy breath of the distant sea. Water is the defining element and the emptying out that occurs in this coastal zone in the fall is a preparation for a fine display of the ‘absolute progress of the seasons’, to paraphrase Thoreau. Quiet observation, in my case, rewarded me with a clear painterly direction, and the universal SPRING gloriously arrived, as predicted." Artist Susan Wilder

Susan is a graduate of Pratt Institute with a BFA in Drawing and Painting. She also studied scientific illustration and worked in the field before publishing some of her illustrations. For fifteen years Susan was the Art Director for L. A. GOAL/Inside Out Productions in California. She currently teaches drawing and painting at Heartwood College in Kennebunk, Maine and is represented by the Wright Gallery in Cape Porpoise, Maine.

Locally, Susan has exhibited at the Kennebunk River Club, Kennebunkport; Heartwood College of Art and the River Tree Center for the Arts, both Kennebunk. Susan has also exhibited extensively in California, Tennessee, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

The Kennebunk Free Library is pleased and honored to be able to present this very talented artist for the month of May.