SEBASTIAN — Joy, humor and broad-ranging talent inform the life and the work of artist Suza Talbot, a recent arrival to the North County art community and already involved, engaged and eager to become even more so.
Tall and slender, with short loosely curling hair, a quick smile, and a low-key, laidback manner, Talbot moved from Gainesville last September to be “closer to my daughter and grandchildren – but not next door.”
She calls her decision to settle in the North County area “a match made in heaven.”
She had visited the area years back on a fishing trip with her then-teenage son.
“I have fond memories of bringing my son to the Sebastian Inlet to fish for snook, before he got his driver’s license,” she recalls.
Taken with the area even then, she revisited it as she sought a place that would be an easy drive to visit her daughter in Melbourne.
It was a perfect fit.
The house she found is also a perfect fit – it’s a two-story frame structure, pale blue with white trim, with broad porches and a grassy, shady yard, reminiscent of the farm houses that dot the corn fields and dusty roads of the Midwest.
It sits slightly off the highway, adjacent to a pineapple field, and Talbot, with the help of her interior designer sister-in-law, has made it her own, filling the rooms with her vintage wooden furniture and the walls with her paintings
. She turned the sunny, screened porch on the west side into a studio, where she works and teaches.
“I am delighted with the Sebastian area. It is very welcoming and open – and I love the outdoors. I love the Environmental Learning Center and all the parks. You can travel from the Wabasso Bridge to Melbourne past all the protected land. Where else can you find that?”
Talbot was born in New York City.
“My dad was military so we lived all over. I claim D.C.,” she laughed, “because we lived there for more than six years.”
An artist as long as she can remember, Talbot works in acrylics, oils, charcoal, pencil, virtually every medium Suza Talbot brings new talent to Sebastian River Art Club (except watercolor.)
“I sold my first painting when I was 6 – in Tangier, Morocco. It was just a cow and some rocks, but a friend of the family bought it and put it up in the American Bar.”
“I have always been interested in figurative art – people, birds, animals.”
Among the works displayed in her home are charming, wobbly newborn calves, cocky roosters and clusters of gossipy hens, tigers, zebras, a gangly, dozing hound dog.
A colorful piece, employing bright, bold strokes (part of a series she calls “Brazil”) is especially eye-catching – depicting a woman carrying out various domestic tasks.
The name, she explains, does not signify a country but is the name of the family’s housekeeper when they lived in Washington, D.C.
Talbot typically works quickly, instinctively.
When drawing, she says, “I use a method of working where I don’t look at the paper – just at the subject. Trust your intuition. It’s a matter of practice.”
This technique, she noted, doesn’t work well with paint because of the several colors and mixing processes, but with a single pencil or charcoal stick “I rely on it.”
The result is a piece that reflects enormous freedom and flow.
Another technique she has developed begins, she smiles, with, “first find a painting you don’t like.”
It was developed from a “happy coincidence” – she was smoothing paper over an old canvas, but the glue was wet and the paper pulled and rippled.
“It just worked.” So she layers colors, applies the paper, allowing it to wrinkle, then draws on the textured surface – in the example on her dining room wall, she has used charcoal to create a feeling of field grasses and wildflowers, with depth provided from subtle, various hues peeking through here and there, from the painted canvas beneath.
She plans to do a workshop on the technique.
“I love the ocean,” says Talbot, and explains a series she has in mind – “The Big Blue Ocean” of imagery, not detail, just creating a sense of the movement of waves and tide, and of the mysteries that exist in the depths – “of something looming.”
Filling one wall – floor to ceiling – is a painting of rough, swirling ocean waters, many shades of blues, green, white – full of movement and power.
Talbot’s artistic particulars impress: A graduate of the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, she did a post-bac at the University of Florida in ceramic sculpture in 2003-2005; she has worked in clay sculpture, although painting is her chief focus and she downplays the other media.
“With clay, I just wanted to stretch myself. I actually liked welding better.”
She is a Florida-certified art teacher and has taught frequently through the years. She conducted a Master’s Workshop at the Vero Beach Museum of Art as well as at the Foosenar Art Museum in Melbourne and at the Daytona Beach Museum; she has exhibited in Ft. Lauderdale, and at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, among other places.
Talbot wasted no time in joining the Sebastian River Art Club, and is also a part of the Studio Tour group, several area artists who open their home studios and galleries to the public one day each year.
This year’s Studio Tour allowed her to introduce herself to her new community and to fellow artists.
She looks forward to teaching classes in her home studio and to becoming integrated into the community she calls “a match made in heaven.”