She sells sea shells, on cards

Published 5:00 am Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Susan Petersen finds inspiration on the beach and in the tidepool.

Susan Petersen’s studio is a study in economy, with everything in its place.

Organization is key because the artist’s living and working quarters share space, and Petersen has amassed a menagerie of materials for her creations – from shells she finds on beach walks, to a plank of rare clear cedar waiting for the perfect project, to masses of fragile, handmade vegetable-dyed paper.

“I’m a compulsive paper junkie,” she said.

She uses the paper in question to make the cards in her Wabi Sabi series, which launched her career as a commercial artist.

Petersen always loved to make art and worked as a framer and gallery representative for years. But in 2002 she found success when she displayed 40 card designs during a Bainbridge studio tour. She decided to pursue art full time and now works simultaneously on four separate series whose influences range from Georgia O’Keefe to East Asian and South Asian art to Northwest marine life in its infinite variety.

Petersen’s Tideline Haiku paintings developed when she came home from a beach walk – “I always come home with my pockets full” – and lined up her shells on the table. That simple column evolved into “a vertical haiku,” a collage that she eventually set against an electric sunset-hued background.

The works in that series grew larger, rounder and more complex, several featuring a mandala-like focal point formed by hundreds of painstakingly collected shells of a single variety.

Petersen also recently delved into scientific illustration by creating a series of nudibranch studies for a local publisher. But it’s the Sea Lily series of paintings and prints that seems to have struck a chord in Northwest galleries.

Each of these paintings vividly presents what Petersen calls a “feature creature” such as a strawberry anemone, a mossy chiton or her signature ochre sea star bordered by images of related species.

The designs are bright and saturated and combine Petersen’s skills as an illustrator with a clear joy of color. She renders the originals in alkyd oil, a resin-based paint frequently used by graphic designers because it offers the workability of oil paint with the smooth texture and fast drying time of acrylic.

The back side of each print includes an annotated rendering of the image whose text Petersen carefully researches using field guides.

This bonus material has contributed to the Sea Lily series’ popularity at museums and education centers such as IslandWood, the Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Ore.

As a child in California, Petersen spent a great deal of time at the ocean collecting shells and other beach bounty. When she got home, she’d sit in the front doorway and paint her findings by the light of the sunset.

Petersen began formally illustrating marine life after taking an oceanography class at Bellevue Community College.

Her instructor asked every student to draw what they studied and held up her illustrations as stellar examples.

“That opened up a whole new sea garden in me,” she said. “It made the sea creatures that lived in this area more familiar. While I had been just a kid stomping around in tide pools, I could now go out with a bit more knowledge of what I was looking at and how fascinating they all are.”

Agriculture proved as influential for Petersen as the water. Her grandfather was a grape farmer who supported his family during the Depression by trading raisins for supplies. Fruit crates were ubiquitous in California farm country; the highly graphical design of their bordered labels informed Petersen’s artistic sensibility and helped create a framework for the Sea Lily series.

Petersen treads softly on her shell-hunting expeditions and only picks up what the sea has freely offered. She said she once learned that many of the shells sold in gift shops, such as the nautilus, are gathered en masse after coral reefs are injected with cyanide.

“It’s a little disturbing to see those because it’s such a fabulous, mysterious creature,” she said. “It would be a shame to lose it because someone wants it on top of a gift box.”