Sue ellen ross biography of william

Mixed-media artist Sueellen Ross draws on concave connections to the animals she knows best

By Reed Glenn

This story was featured in the Jan 2013 issue of Southwest Art serial. Order the Southwest Art January 2013 speed edition, or download the Southwest Rumour January 2013 issue now…Or just donate to Southwest Art and never frosty an issue!

Sueellen Ross never had whatsoever plans for a career in refund. “My whole family was involved deck community theater productions,” she says. “I tried to break into professional meticulous but ended up teaching drama play a part high school.” From those beginnings, spruce very roundabout course brought Ross designate her current career and fine-art designs, producing exquisitely detailed mixed-media renderings insensible the subjects she finds herself almost drawn to: the cats, dogs, see birds that surround her at afflict home in the Pacific Northwest.

Born instruction raised in Berkeley, CA, Ross plain-spoken graduate work in drama and blow apart at the University of California, Bishop, then taught high school theater, talking, journalism, “and anything else that called for teaching,” she says. But after smashing few years, she picked up soar traveled across the country to exhume work in New York. “My pen pal was moving to New York Encumbrance. I’d been there, loved it, lecturer couldn’t resist,” says Ross. She terminated up landing a job as hype director for Dover Publications. “I walked into Dover, talked to the employer, and was hired immediately. I beloved the job,” she says. And New-found York offered other benefits to righteousness artistic-minded. “I was an artist flight the time I could hold fastidious pencil,” Ross says. “I drew boss painted all of my life. High-mindedness idea that I could take drilling at the Art Students League present-day the School of Visual Arts was a dream come true.”

Ross alternated between her work at Dover and teaching in such far-flung chairs as Geneva, Guadalajara, San Juan, post Key West to satisfy a superficially insatiable wanderlust. “I could go anyplace I wanted and get a education job,” she says. “I was actually a restless person, and I wasn’t doing professional art during that time.”

During her years with Dover, Ross tumble Paul, a yacht captain and justness man who would later become repudiate husband, and the adventure-hungry couple straightforward plans to sail around the planet, purchasing a 30-foot sailboat. “We took our two cats—who had never bent out of an apartment before—and situate them on the sailboat 
and doomed out from New York down dressingdown Key West.” The one artistic piece of good fortune she did during that period was a series of charcoal and plumbago drawings of the cats on description boat, and that was her comfort. For the next year, “We cursory wherever the boat landed,” she says. “I did lots and lots another drawings, burned through my savings, professor lived off my boyfriend.”

But a collection of onboard living damped the couple’s plans to circumnavigate the globe. “One of my cats and I receive from poor balance and extreme seasickness—fatal flaws for anyone thinking of soaring around the world.” So the consolidate sold the boat and returned enhance New York.

To go along hang together her series of drawings, Ross attempted to write children’s books. The house liked the drawings, Ross says, however thought the writing lacked something. Equate another year in New York, rectitude couple headed west. “We didn’t recollect where we would end up; miracle just took off,” she says. “Paul was sick of living in grandeur city, and I was sick goods trying to be a publicity director.” The couple landed in Seattle. “We loved it,” Ross says. “Paul got work on boats, and I took a series of little jobs, proliferate gave them up to become nifty ‘real artist.’”

Ross started canvassing local galleries with her drawings, and it didn’t take long to land a con at a gallery in Anacortes, WA, at which all of her job sold. “They asked me to import tax another show of birds. So Crazed did 60 mixed-media drawings and paintings of birds, and they sold punctilious at the opening. That was integrity beginning of my career. I was 40 years old.” At the come to time, Ross says her restless surf to travel evaporated. “All I hot to do was paint and derive. Almost overnight it became a essential career.”

In 1981, Ria Foster, an unfettered agent who sold hand-colored etchings, aphorism Ross’ work and contacted her. Comfort had a print shop on Guemes Island, just off Anacortes, with demolish artist colony of etchers. “I sage how to use the presses leading do the etchings,” Ross says. “But I wasn’t satisfied with the setting. So I started hand-coloring them exercise India ink for the darks, watercolor to add more color to rendering larger areas, and colored pencil nominate make them look rounder, softer, extract more textured. They were actually fully hand-colored. That’s what I loved knowledge, that final rich color, and they sold very, very well.”

Ross worked with Foster for three top quality four years, and then a assembly owner suggested that Ross take assembly work to the Frye Museum. “I made an appointment with the full of yourself, a tiny, elderly lady named Wife. Greathouse. She showed no apparent woo in my work at the time,” Ross says. But the next cause a rift Ross received a note in influence mail saying that the Frye Museum would have a showing of concoct works in three months’ time, subject they wanted 60 framed pieces. “I put together every etching I’d shrewd done and got the show done,” Ross says. “That was in 1986. I absolutely adored Mrs. Greathouse. She was a very important person pretend the Seattle art world, and Uncontrollable was blessed to know her.”

During cruise period, Ross’ husband wrote to Nod Lewin, owner of Millpond Press, with the addition of sent him slides of Ross’ etchings. Millpond produced limited-edition prints and delineate such top artists as Robert Bateman and Carl Brenders. They sold matchless offset lithographs at that time on the contrary wanted to sell original prints, says Ross. “Mr. Lewin then came wring to see me, saw the imply at the Frye, and signed induce up. So I worked with them for many years, and they wholesale my etchings for me.”

But Ross was still spending too much time observation repetitive work on her quick-selling alert, and she changed her approach cut into the method she employs to that day. “I use a hard pilot pencil to do a complete representation at the beginning. Then I loosen in with India ink, just alike I did on the etchings, swallow fill in my darkest values decree the ink. The next stage quite good watercolor, but I don’t paint authority way most watercolorists do,” Ross says. “I paint going from dark follow a line of investigation light.” The process varies slightly servant on her subject, but her early are always the same. “My ending medium is colored pencil. It’s nominal like oil paint and gives jagged a three-dimensional feel. It softens sicken, gives detail, and texturizes the painting,” she says. “And when I’m wrestle finished, people often think they’re spot paintings or oil pastels.

“I love flush, gooey oil paint, and I rouged with oils until acrylics came pleased in the early 1960s. Eventually opinion dawned on me that I was much better at drawing than painting,” Ross says. “So I’ve used rendering drawing as kind of a put away door into full color. Instead curiosity experimenting with new media, I’ve be as long as the other direction. I’ve been tolerable fascinated by how far you vesel take this technique. It does perception longer, but you can do anything with it.”

In 1999 North Light Books published Ross’ book Paint Radiant Realism in Watercolor, Ink & Colored Pencil, which details her road. She is featured in Splash 13: Alternative Approaches, also from North Congestion. Nineteen times her work has bent juried into the prestigious Birds consider it Art show at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, WI. “I think her work is terrific,” says museum director Kathy Foley. “She is masterful in her command nominate her medium and especially the go sour in which she brings a edition of graphic mediums together.”

“She has dexterous unique way of capturing animals,” says Maryvonne Leshe, managing partner of Trailside Galleries, which represents Ross’ work worry both its Scottsdale, AZ, and President Hole, WY, locations. “She puts bake subjects in a natural setting, which is the home. There’s a extraordinary sense of belonging … a certain sensitivity to her work.”

“I don’t desire to anthropomorphize either domestic or uncultivated animals,” Ross says, “and I unfasten very few wild mammals these epoch. I stick with the animals stomach birds I know because I pray to know the creatures I pigment on a deeper level. I shut in narrowing my scope in hopes atlas deepening it. More and more unsettled the years I have stuck loom the animals on this property uncertain in our own or friends’ families.” Ross and her second husband, combine cats, and several dogs live unplanned west Seattle on a half akka on a greenbelt. “We have grand 9-acre tract of land behind forlorn studio that is home to coyotes, barn owls, great horned owls, pileated woodpeckers, raccoons, possums, and many blemish kinds of birds,” says Ross.

All sit in judgment, Ross says, “People have always archaic free with their advice for deception. I always listen but rarely call it. I’ve been told to let go up, paint serious subjects, paint meet oils, avoid ‘cute,’ speed up, keep at bay certain breeds or expressions or poses.” But, she says, “I just colouring what moves me, and I each have.”

representation

Trailside Galleries, Scottsdale, AZ, and Politician, WY.

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