We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Susie Barrett. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Susie below.

Susie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I think like many creatives, I have always had a calling to create. From an early age, I was drawn to beautiful aesthetics and design. I loved the order of color coordinated books lined up in a row, pushed to the edge of a shelf so that all the bindings were aligned. We had not one, but two libraries in our home, and I would play with the books in the children’s library for hours. Starting around age 12, I also fell in love with linen closets and would fold and refold sheets and towels so that all the shelves had a pleasing stacked symmetry. Reoccurring patterns fascinated me.

My mother liked to sew and craft, but these things were just hobbies she did in her free time. Her hobbies allowed me access to arts and crafts materials. I remember as a child in elementary school sitting for hours drawing free form shapes on pieces of white office paper and filling them in with colored pencils and markers. Art quickly became my favorite subject in school.

In the sixth grade, I transitioned to a new school where I met the most influential teacher of my life, Mr. Don Lovell. Mr. Lovell illustrated to me that there were, in fact, many career paths in the arts. He would go on to be my art teacher until high school graduation. Looking back on those years, several projects stand out as formative to the work I do today. A unit on pointillism fostered my love for polka dots and I often incorporate dots as flower detail or for background texture in paintings. A project using watercolors produced a piece I titled Bag Lady Frog and was the beginning of my playful, whimsical style which works to not take itself too seriously. Lastly, a still life painted in my senior year really began my current style and technique. Although I have gotten markedly better at the execution of the technique, that piece was its origin. Unfortunately, none of these pieces remain today. One other project stands out for a different reason. A second art teacher joined the class and required me to do at least one realistic piece for the semester. Up until that point all my work had been abstract. Using chalk, I drew an old, nondescript African American woman. The piece was good, and I received high marks for it. But it did not resonate with me. I did not like the feel of realistic drawing. It did not bring me the joyous freedom abstract work did. It was then I decided I would create what I loved because of the feeling it gave me, not because of the outcome.

After graduation, I put away my creative pursuits for many, many years. Family pressure persuaded me to pursue a more traditional career and then having a family of my own devoured my time. It wasn’t until well into my adulthood I felt the freedom and calling to paint again. Several trips to Hawaii in 2013 and 2014 opened a floodgate to what had been being built up inside. What started as a thank you for hospitality on the trips turned into literally hundreds of paintings. I can only describe what happened as a burning desire to create. At the time I had just moved and was between employment. I would get up and the first thing I would do before even taking a shower was paint. Then I’d have a snack and paint some more. Then I’d stop to take a walk around the block and then I’d paint some more. Then I’d stop to eat lunch and I’d paint some more. Pretty soon it would be 9PM and I would still be painting. I just could not stop but at the same time, it felt like no time had gone by. Many nights I painted into the wee hours of the morning only to get up and start all over again the next day. It wasn’t until about a year into this routine that I started to tell people I was painting and post paintings to my social media accounts. Once I did that, there was just no looking back. Whether I had wanted to pursue art as a full-time career or not, it was happening organically. And as Paulo Coelho points out in my favorite book The Alchemist, “Sometimes there’s just no way to hold back the river.”

Susie, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

While I paint in several different styles, I am best known for what I call my “tropical stained-glass” style. This is the style I began in high school and unearthed again when I started painting in 2014. While the subject matter is not entirely tropical (I also paint lots of florals in general), the works are very graphic in nature and have a saturated look and feel. My technique requires great patience as I go over each area sometimes 4 or 5 times to achieve high opacity. The manner in which I paint is also smooth with the goal of few to no brush strokes visible in the finished piece. Sometimes background texture is added through dots and lines in the underpainting. The color portion of my paintings is done in acrylics. To achieve a rich stained-glass effect, the line detail is painted in black oil. Over the past few years, I’ve also started incorporating gold foil over finished paintings which adds even further “pop”. My paintings are bold, bright, and playful. I don’t believe art has to be serious or make a political statement. The goal of my pieces is merely to bring joy to the viewer and color to the world.

Another style I am known for is highly textured abstracts with no distinct subject matter. They are often somewhat linear in nature and often take on a gradient feel. The works are textured with various materials from coffee to sand and are composed using a palette knife instead of a brush. This work is created with acrylic paint added to the other granulated materials.

I have created works for public and private spaces, as well as had my work reproduced and sold nationally in HomeGoods stores. I sell the pieces I create directly primarily through social media platforms. I also love the challenge of creating commissioned artwork. I find original artwork is both a thoughtful and special gift for almost any occasion. I encourage anyone who is interested to reach out to me and just start a conversation. I often find people are intimidated with this process because they assume artwork is too expensive; however, I work to make a variety of size and price points available to the public. I believe art is important to our lives and should be accessible to all.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I think everyone is creative in some aspect, whether you are using surgical skills to sew up a patient or taking apart an engine to diagnose the rattling noise coming from your truck. To me everyone uses creativity daily, so being a creative isn’t a choice. It’s who we are as human beings. Pursuing a career in the arts is simply the decision some of us make to allow what is inside our brains and bodies to visually come to the surface and be expressed in physical forms such as painting, theater, and dance. People who have made this career choice tend to be deemed dreamers because we visualize a lot. To others we may appear lazy or not to be doing anything when in actuality it takes a lot of thinking and being inside your own head and its creative space in order to process what comes out in an original work. The world’s most famous scientists and businessmen such as Albert Einstein and Henry Ford used the same process.

Pursuing a career in the arts has its ups and downs like any career path. There are days where you have deadlines to make. There are days when the creativity is not flowing, and you just can’t force it. There are days when the creativity is flowing so freely you can’t stop it and you don’t want to stop it to eat a meal or to go to bed or to do other tasks that are seemingly important on a day-to-day basis. I know personally, my creativity doesn’t start at 9AM and go away at 5PM. My creative process is a passion and who I am more than what I do.

Once a person decides on a creative career path, money becomes secondary because as I said earlier, you just can’t stop the river. Unfortunately, the society we live in requires currency to survive and at this point in our history that currency is money. While artists would create regardless, we are often undervalued in terms of importance. People forget without designers, we would not have chairs to sit on. Without musicians, we would not have songs on the radio to listen to. In fact, our culture is so emersed in art, that it has become somewhat transparent and taken for granted. If the public understood how much time and energy the creation of art equates to cost, they would acknowledge artists are often working for pennies on the dollar. It is a true labor of love.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

There are many rewarding aspects of being an artist. One of the primary rewards I have found over the course of the last several years is being an inspiration to others. I never imagined that to be a by-product of just doing what I love, but I am repeatedly told by friends and those who follow my artistic journey online that I make a difference in their lives. I often hear people say it makes them happy to see me follow my dreams and express desires to have the freedom or tenacity or courage to follow theirs. In a way, they live vicariously through me, and I am blessed that they cheer me on. I work to encourage others that they too really can follow their childhood dreams whatever those dreams may be. They simply need to develop their muscle of faith. I’m not sure how I developed mine, but one day I just came to the realization upon looking at my life that God had always provided for me through the peaks and the valleys, and he wasn’t going to stop. So, I just took a “leap of faith” not knowing where my journey would lead or having a concrete destination in mind. I know it sounds cliché, but it was at that point I started to understand the journey is the destination. Reaching “the destination” is a myth because if we stop growing, we stop living.

In unison with inspiring others, is simply having the freedom to do what I love daily and to create without judgement. I create what I love for myself and hope it resonates with others, but I don’t create specifically with the marketability of a piece in mind. I paint because it makes me happy, and the outcome is playful, colorful artwork. When I create commissions specifically for others, it is a welcomed challenge to stretch my thought process and skillset, but I still create works in one of my signature styles. I don’t do something I’m not and if someone requests that I just point them in a more appropriate direction. There is a peace in knowing that every artist is unique. I am not in competition with anyone else but myself and I want others to succeed just as I hope they wish for my success.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.susiebarrettART.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susiebarrettART
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/susiebarrettART