We recently connected with Suzanne Elizabeth Murphy and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Suzanne Elizabeth, thanks for joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

Everything great that has ever come into my life has been a result of taking a risk or some giant leap of faith into the new and unknown.

When I lived in NYC decades ago, I wrote the following for a weekly writer’s group I helped found. The words come from my first experience of scuba diving in the Netherlands Antilles. I was fearful during my training in a cold lake. The wet suit, big fins, mask, heavy oxygen tank, weight belt, breathing tube and regulator. All made me feel clumsy and not myself. I had to learn how to make it all part of me. After all, I was becoming a fish!

Water Thoughts

Memory of water takes me down.
I silently descend,
Drifting beyond things I think I know.
The power of blue,
Pulling me toward ecstasy and danger.
I will soon not be myself,
But something unimagined in that place above.
Something that belongs here below.
I am losing my colors, leaving them with the sun,
Disappearing into a world of watery flickering
As if behind a sheer curtain moving in the breeze.
I am not afraid of what may show itself to me.
Of things I only feel might be so.

Had I not faced my fear of scuba diving, I would not have discovered the mystery and beauty of the coral reefs. I would not have those images and feelings of that world 40, 50, 60 feet down that prompted me to write a children’s book about it 30 years ago. And I would not be painting that story right now.

The little girl in my story must also take a risk before she can fulfill her heart’s desire to swim with the fishes. Her curiosity and trust overcome any fear, and she sets out on her life-changing adventure with a new friend who helps her discover not only his water world, but also her personal power and courage.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Thinking about this Canvas Rebel Interview and how to present myself and my work has been a revelation as my mind traveled through my own Artist’s Journey, finally understanding how my work has always come from the life I have lived. When do our hearts and imaginations begin to form an artist? What lights up our minds when we’re young? It’s different for each one of us. I was very sickly in my youth. Even polio without paralysis shadowed me at the age of 5. I spent hours and hours with my books, not just reading the words but looking at the pictures. I devoured them. I walked into them and became part of the story. Some of the great twentieth century illustrators such as N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle and Arthur Rackham drew me into the visual world of storytelling which still today has me captive.

I can still remember listening to Princess Grace’s 1956 wedding on the radio as my Aunt Jody painted a small watercolor for me of a bride and groom in front of a rose stained-glass window. I was mesmerized. The wedding story unfolded with every brushstroke.

As a teenager, I realized through dance classes that my ankles weren’t strong enough to be a ballerina. And I was starting too late. But I loved the feeling inside me of translating classical music to body language. So, of course, my favorite artist became Edgar Degas and his pastels of the ballet.

I took some illustration courses at the Kansas City Art Institute and learned to draw. I learned about perspective and foreshortening. I learned how descriptive black line could be without any help from color. I fell in love with the Black Line. Fashion illustration, greeting cards, book illustration, newspaper advertising required nothing more than the contrast of pen and ink, graphite or charcoal on white paper. I stayed there in that black and white world a long time.

My influences broadened into a lifetime admiration for painters such John Singer Sargent, Juaquin Sorolla and the decorative Art Nouveau figures of Alphonse Mucha. In 1976, I was 30 years old and divorced. I moved to New York City and went to work in the film industry to make a living. I lived in an illegal loft in the garment district just down the street from Macy’s with my now husband. I took ballet lessons and singing lessons. I took figure drawing at the Art Students League. I wanted to take in everything that wonderful City had to offer me. I started my own greeting card company and marketed my black and white City Snickers cards all over New York. Each card was an observation about life in the City I now loved.

Then one day, I went to a production at the Metropolitan Opera. I had to know how they created such a story. I studied for two years at the Lester Polakov Studio Forum of Stage Design where a brilliant staff of working theatre designers taught costume, lighting and set design. I loved delving into the history of costume through the ages and learning how clothing could define character, rank and even create body language (a certain way of moving). And even today, what I learned about stage lighting helps me light my canvases. Theatre was storytelling on the stage. The pop-up books of my childhood brought to life. I was enraptured, designing and constructing costumes for summer stock theatre and special events like reinventing the Macy’s Santa Claus (which they still feature to this day).

In 1983, unable to negotiate a new lease on our NYC loft, we moved across the Hudson River to Jersey City and the 10-year renovation of a 100-year-old brick row house. My heart sunk, and I felt that I was forsaking the place that would help me fulfill my dream of becoming a painter.

In 1987, a publishing job in NYC to help pay for the renovation took most of the time and energy I possessed. I helped my husband establish and produce a performance series of dance, music and theater at a local outreach church, and I completed a course for Writing Children’s Books at the New School which lead to a few stories I began to illustrate. One of my greatest regrets is that I was not painting when I lived in NYC. I loved the architecture in the urban canyons, the faces and movement of people in the streets.

But the great illustrator, N.C. Wyeth said this:
“Painting and illustration cannot be mixed. One cannot merge from one to the other.”

I hadn’t yet formed the mindset of a painter. I wasn’t ready to make that paradigm shift. In 1993, a huge leap from the East Coast to southern Colorado found us at the foot of Pikes Peak in a 100-year-old stone and stucco house with a cottage across the courtyard. We turned it into our magical Prickly Pear Cottage Bed & Breakfast. I painted the furniture and leaves on the floor. I cut stencils for a pinecone border around the faux finished walls. We produced community theatre and cabaret events at the Business of Art Center. I designed programs, posters, costumes and sets. I even created The Manitou Springs Coloring Book. I made a deal with Crayola for free crayons to package with the Book. In looking back, I realize that art of some form has permeated my whole life. And my whole life has determined the kind of art that was needed at the time.

The Poet, M.C. Richards wrote, “All the arts we practice are apprenticeships.
The big art is our life.”

In 1996, inspired by a monastic community in New Mexico, we committed to the idea of building a strawbale house and living off the grid. And so, my brave husband and I left civilization behind, bought 40 acres farther south on Wild Horse Mesa and began the next eleven-year adventure

Surrounded now by golden straw walls that smelled like a horse barn without the horses, I looked out on 40 acres of sagebrush and pinon trees. We had built our strawbale home 8500 feet above sea level on a 9-mile long granite mesa inhabited by domesticated donkeys, three herds of wild Spanish mustangs, bears, mountain lions and elk. An extinct volcano loomed to the south like a blue moon rising, and the Sangre de Cristo mountain range rose to the east, turning blood red with the sunsets. New Mexico lay four miles to the south. Blue sky encircled us, and we felt as if we lived on an island in the sky.
How could I not paint?
Our power came from solar panels we turned by hand each day. We bought an old red truck, hauled our own water and wood and heated our 2500 sq. ft. house with one wood stove. It would take us 11 years to finish the house. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
For the first time, I had room for a studio. I had quiet and the sweet smell of straw that always found a way to stick to the back of my paintings. No time to practice. No time to hesitate. I bought my acrylic paints, canvas and new brushes. My husband built a simple easel. I took a deep breath and began.

I would get up each morning, light the fire, make the coffee and walk into my straw bale studio with butterflies in my stomach. Most of the time, I was still in my nightgown, and our house was 48 degrees before it warmed from the fire. But I didn’t feel the cold until I stopped painting…for lunch…for dinner. It was as if I had been waiting all my life, storing up this longing to paint with color on canvas. I produced one 24” x 30” painting each week for 8 weeks. I do not to this day understand how I did what I did. It was just in me! And it has flowed from me ever since.
I began to paint my mesa surroundings and the aura that permeated this old Spanish region of farmers and ranchers. I walked the animal paths through our 40 acres, picking up rocks and arrowheads. I made sagebrush smudge sticks. I gathered wildflower bouquets for the table. I learned the gray green colors of a high plains desert and the rich autumn colors of the low land grasses below. The pinon bark smelled like vanilla after a rain, and there was so much sky. I lived in my paintings.

I painted my Mother walking through a sagebrush path with her blackthorn stick. Friends came to visit. I painted them. I tried my hand at pastels. Everyone thought I did great “weeds.” I used my favorite things for still life paintings…making stories. There are so many painting lessons in still life.

My Southwest work found a market. At the foot of our mesa, we discovered a diverse artist colony of painters, writers, potters, weavers, sculptors and musicians. I was invited to show in the annual Fall Studio Tour that brought art lovers and buyers all the way from Denver…5 hours away. My fellow artist and I set up in an abandoned adobe house with no roof, no windows and no door. After we cleaned up the pigeon poop and feathers, we set the stage by adding hand-painted furniture, colorful rugs on the dirt floor and laid out a feast of wine and finger food. It was bohemian and glorious!

By 2004, I felt I was working too hard to blend colors and find subtleties in acrylic paint. I bought my first oil paints and everything changed. Juicy, squishy, transparent, rich oils! I was hooked! I realized that I had never understood “edges” until I painted with oils…how to make them come together or even disappear. The paint stayed wet, and I could work it and work it!
Two collectors found me. My Colorado collector commissioned a large painting of a Spanish church overlooking the San Luis Valley for his Best Western Hotel. He built several kiosks in the Hotel to showcase my work and set up a standing card rack for my cards. And he bought up all my still life works. It surprised me that a man would prefer still life over landscape.
My Kansas City collector commissioned paintings of many places dear to his heart in both Kansas City and Colorado.
My husband and I continued work on our straw house. We founded a Mesa fire department and the county’s first Chamber of Commerce. But after eleven years, we made another zigzag.

Most things have beginnings and middles and endings. Lives do. Paintings do. The beginning has always been my favorite part. To me, a beginning is like the Big Bang. It has energy. It has a spark. It starts everything, and anything is possible. After that, everything slows down, just like the cosmos is slowing down. Just like a painting slows down and attention moves to detail. But evolution takes a long time. Mine has.

In 2007, we sold the straw house and our 40 acres and said goodbye to our island in the sky. We packed a 24-foot truck and drove to Florida. We wanted a washing machine, a doorbell and to never be that cold again. We bought a little house in Tarpon Springs. We renovated. We bought health insurance and enjoyed our new-found freedom from the pioneer life. Another beginning was here.

Early in 2008, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I’d had no insurance for 11 years, but now I did. After two lumpectomies and a lymphectomy, I surfaced with a new excitement about life. I bought a convertible (a longtime dream). I baked at the beach and began to feel a change coming. Our small house allowed no space for painting, and so I rented two rooms in a shopping plaza for my studio. I hadn’t painted for a year…

I had moved from a strawbale house on a high plains desert to sea level in a small Greek village on the western edge of Florida. The Gulf Coast colors were different from the gray greens of Colorado. I had to learn a new palette. I painted the water that was everywhere. I painted the annual Epiphany during which Greek boys dive for a golden cross in Spring Bayou. I painted the boats, the boys. I painted children in their traditional village costumes. I painted the beaches, the sunsets, the clouds, the mangrove trees in the bayous and oh, the reflections. I painted portraits and a series of children at the beach that I call my WaterBabies.

A trip to New Orleans later that year renewed my love of urban storytelling. I was fascinated with the open doors and windows through which a passerby could only glimpse the parallel lives inside. I finished three paintings and wanted to do more in this series. But I got distracted. Another change was coming.
In 2010, I made a decision to knock down walls and enlarge my studio to one open room which could also serve as gallery space. My landlord agreed to help. “Build it, and they will come” was never so true. I was asked to take over a painting class for Tarpon Springs Park and Recreation. I thought I’d better practice teaching in my new studio first. I had never taught. I put up the sign and wondered who would see it. Students found me. I learned to talk about what I do and found ways to guide other painters.

Looming over me in 2011 was the prospect of a bi-lateral knee replacement. Before the surgery, I began a series of Figurative Nudes. Singular figures with focus on light, shadow and color. I worked from old black and white photos of myself. I couldn’t have a model in my studio full of windows. I had no idea what I would do with these images until I began to draw. I turned the figures upside, leaping and suspended in an atmosphere of color. I worked purely from intuition.
Later that year, my long recovery from knee surgery took every ounce of courage and fortitude I had to give. Three months later, I was teaching, but wouldn’t paint again for another three months. When I picked up the paintbrush again, I continued with my Nudes. These figures are not meant to be me. They are interior moments of elation, sadness, quietness and victory. I gave them names like Full of Grace, Illumination, Gravity, Leap of Faith and Ennui. The last one I have yet to name. I can’t seem to find it. But I think it represents the melancholy and that faraway world I lived in under the influence of opioid pain medication.

“The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.”
Sherwood Anderson, American novelist

Here and there, I have strayed from my studio/gallery to give back to my community. I served 3 years on the Tarpon Springs Public Art Committee which directs the city’s Public Art Program. I joined Rotary as the only artist member, and I expanded my teaching for 2 years as a Faculty member at the Dunedin Fine Arts Center.

In 2018, Artist and Poet, Percy Kleinops, joined me as Studio Partner. Life has not been the same since. Twice as many paintings, ideas, exhibits to share! The last five years have been intense and full of change once again. I have undergone three hip replacements and my remarkable Mother has passed away. I am an artist. I am a teacher. But I have not taught since 2020. I miss my students, each one so different in what they love to paint and even why they paint. Each one brought into my classes wisdom, inspiration and patience with the learning process. In teaching them, each one has reminded me of lessons I had forgotten.

“To teach is to learn twice over.” Joseph Joubert – French moralist and essayist

Since the beginning of my painting career, I have realized that of all the people who love my paintings, only a small percentage can afford to buy the original. But still, they love it. And so even from my mesa straw bale studio in Colorado, I found a photographer/printer who could turn my work into beautiful prints on canvas or fine art paper. My sister, Dianna, in Kansas City worked with me to create small note cards of my Colorado landscapes and still life. This was the way I could share my work with many people who wanted to own a piece of art that touched them in some way. And this is a tradition that Percy and I have carried into our studio and gallery in Tarpon Springs. We have card racks and print racks everywhere!
Gaining perspective on our own work is a challenge. The two hardest questions for any artist to answer are. What are you doing? and Why are you doing it?

But Emily Dickinson wrote,
“Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door…”

To me, that means I can’t know from where inspiration will come. But I can hope that the stories I need to tell will reveal themselves.
And so, after almost three decades of painting for exhibitions, I am circling back to a story I want to finish telling. Thirty years ago, as a scuba diver, I descended into the blue and discovered the beauty and mystery of the coral reefs. I wrote a story about it. Then I put it away. It has haunted my heart ever since. It is a story for children of all ages and is as important today as it was then.

Coral reefs around the world were endangered then. Now, they teeter on extinction in many parts of the world. I am bringing my memories to life in Mirabelle and the Sea Green Bathtub to tell a story that I hope will bring children, parents and grandparents everywhere closer to a world they may never experience for themselves, but a world that needs saving.
When I drafted the manuscript in NYC, I was an illustrator. Now I am a painter, and I am painting my story.

“An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.” – James Whistler

Percy and I are so grateful to have work that fulfills us. We try to stay optimistic that the work will love us back. We are continually finding innovative ways to bring clients into our world with Art Newsletters, Blogs and Studio Poetry Readings. We want to help them understand who we are and to earn their trust.
Remember that art can heal, make you happy, keep you feeling.
Suzanne

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

The goal of my creative journey has always been about recognizing the story that needed to be told and then telling it with my art. The ways I found to tell those stories are the very ways in which my art life unfolded. Costume and set designs, a coloring book of an historic town, landscape or portrait commissions, the universal story of children playing by the water’s edge, paintings of the places I have lived. The story changes because I change. My life changes and my art along with it. My life isn’t changing this time. But I am. I have rediscovered a story that I never finished telling. My creative journey is now dedicated to completing 24 paintings and 24 drawings for the book, Mirabelle and the Sea Green Bathtub. The imagery in my mind is strong. The paintings are guided by text on the pages. Each painting is a new composition that starts with my words and then my memories and feelings. The prospect of getting the book published looms in my future. To accomplish that will be an art in itself made up of good luck and magic!
But for now, my journey is Mirabelle’s journey…through adventure, terror, wonder, sadness and trust. Trust in herself and the difference she might make.
That’s what I hope I have been doing with my art all these years. And that’s what I hope Mirabelle and I can do together for the fragile coral reefs around the world. Make a difference!

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The Rewards of Being an Artist “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” Edgar Degas
The best reward I can think of is what I feel when a client says that they will have my paintings in their family for generations.
Or when parents of their young daughter that they haven’t seen in three years and who has died in a motorcycle accident come to me with the selfies on her phone and ask me to paint her portrait. We talked for a long time about what she was like and how she lived her short life. I listened. They told me that what I painted was her.
Or when the Greek father of two sons comes to me with an old, small black and white photo of them both. Big brother and little brother together. The older son had died at age 22. After all these years, he wanted a color painting of his sons together.
I call this Painting in the Dark.
A Kansas City client had seen some of my paintings of historic places there. He commissioned a painting of an historic rose garden surrounded by a circle of stone pergolas. In the center was a large circular fountain and a bench. The client did not specify the composition. So when I chose to paint the entire garden with the fountain and bench in the middle, I had no idea that he had proposed to his wife on that bench. He’s tall. She’s short. She was standing on it. When he proposed, she jumped down and ran around the fountain. When she got back to him, all he could say was, “Is that a yes?” I met him at the frame shop and will always remember his joy and surprise at what he saw.
There are rewards in teaching, watching students learn and grow. There are rewards in service. My three years of work on the Public Art Committee has given me lasting joy as we installed and dedicated a 6’4” bronze mermaid that “stands” on the banks of Spring Bayou in Tarpon Springs.
These collected moments are forever stored in my artist’s heart. I have dozens and dozens of them. They make me brave enough to try again the next time.
“Throw your heart into the picture and then jump in after it.” Howard Pyle

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.suzanneelizabethmurphy.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram,com/sizannespaint
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/suzannemurphy