PROFILE- Susan & Rufus Williams-Nov/Dec 2009

by Suzette McAvoy
Photography Irvin Serrano

A Rockport couple share an artful life

His-and-hers studio buildings share the grounds of artists Rufus and Susan Williams’s home in Rockport, along with a moveable glass greenhouse that enables the couple to harvest vegetables ten months out of the year. “The last of the tomatoes are usually eaten at Thanksgiving, the herbs make it until Christmas, and the final salad greens are served at Super Bowl time,” says Susan.

Serving up the results of their own labors is consistent with this artistic couple’s approach to life. They met as art students at Bowdoin College in 1980 and have been together ever since. But their route back to Maine—where they always intended to end up—was a circuitous, twenty-three-year journey. “We’ve moved every seven years,” says Susan, “we are in the first place we aren’t leaving.”

After graduating from college, they ended up in San Francisco. To support their art, they started an art-supply and stretcher-bar company called Rubars. “I learned to make stretchers at Bowdoin,” says Rufus. “They were a simple design, therefore we could make them and sell them inexpensively.” Rubars was profitable, and after four years they sold the business—which still exists—to their employees.

The experience of starting and running a successful company inspired Rufus to start another, and over the next fifteen years, in addition to his creative pursuits, he ran First Source, an environmental-services company he founded in California. First Source brought the family back east, first to Maryland and then to New Jersey. When the opportunity to sell the company arose in the late 1990s, he grabbed the chance, and the couple began the transition back to Maine as they “had always wanted.”

In 2002 Rufus and Susan bought fifty-four acres adjacent to Beech Hill Preserve in Rockport—a scenic and historically significant property that is owned by Coastal Mountain Land Trust. A classmate from Bowdoin introduced the couple to Jay Fischer of Cold Mountain Builders in nearby Belfast. The couple knew immediately they had found the ideal contractor. “Rufus and I knew what we wanted to build,” says Susan, “and we trusted Jay, there was a shared aesthetic.”

The couple sketched out a simple design of “essentially three boxes,” and over the winter of 2002–2003, the house and studios were built. With minimal oversight by the owners (Rufus visited the site twice and Susan only once) the project was “on time and under budget”—a testament to their creative accord with Fischer and his crew.

The move to Maine sparked an intensely productive period for Rufus. “I spent solidly the first three and half years in the studio,” he says. “Being here allowed me to reconnect with the bits and pieces of Maine that I loved—the locations, to be sure, but also literally bits and pieces: rocks, sticks, shells, plants, and things.” These small collected objects serve as talismans for Rufus, triggering memories that fuel his art.

Rufus’s keenly rendered watercolors and drawings, which range from the intimate to the broader view, are rooted in his close observations of nature. A work may be prompted by “the way ripples move in a tidal pool” or “the way a clam shell or lobster claw dropped by a seagull sits in a clump of moss.” The artist says, “There are many different kinds of visual touchstones that I find interesting and I explore all of them, whether abstract or representational. I think that’s why my work is as varied as it is.”

He cites John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and the early watercolors of Andrew Wyeth as particular inspirations. “I think of my work as a dialogue with myself and my history, and with other artists and what they’ve painted,” he says. The Leonardo DaVinci show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2003, which he saw just before the move to Maine, was “hands down the most incredible show I had ever seen.” The experience inspired a finely detailed drawing of milkweed pods.

The result of Rufus’s focused efforts in the new Maine studio was a 2007 solo exhibition at Ten High Street gallery in Camden. For Susan—who had shown her work steadily since the early 1980s, and who had enjoyed several major successes, including solo exhibitions at Gerald Peters Gallery in New York City and the acquisition of a large number of her works by Goldman Sachs Group—living in Maine full-time occasioned a reevaluation of her art and her relationship to painting.

“Even in California, I painted Maine,” sh
e says. “Maine has always been the subject matter.” But it was Maine as metaphor—an idealized place located only in her imagination—that had inspired her previous work. Now that she was finally living here “surrounded by subject matter that I had been longing to paint, where was the passion, the longing? The sense of urgency that had been my subject went away.”

So in 2007 she took a year off from painting and instead shot a photograph every day—“365 days, click and commit,” she says. “It was part of the rooting process I needed to do. After I was finished, I missed painting, and since then a lot of good stuff has been coming out of the studio.”

Her recent work marries her love for abstract and expressive mark-making with her devotion to the natural world. The pairing of cropped landscape images with flat fields of color and gestural brushwork reference the dichotomies of contemporary life. Like all her work, they are places seen in the mind’s eye rather than in observed reality. “I’m a studio painter,” she says. “It’s always just make-believe. The same place that I would crawl into as a kid, I try to find again as a grown-up.”

Trees figure prominently in her new work, metaphorically suggesting the symbolism of nurturing, beauty, longevity, and life and death. “There have always been two mechanisms that trigger my painting,” says Susan, “making sense of things when they are out of balance—politics, family, the environment—and secondly, my impulse to take care of things, to nurture, to make somethi
ng beautiful—nothing more complicated than that.”

Rufus’s longstanding interest in business and Susan’s desire to stay connected with “the world outside the studio” resulted in their partnership with Swan’s Island Blankets in 2005. Since then, Rufus has advised on distribution and the development of new products, and Susan has served as creative director, providing the “visual voice” for the company’s marketing materials.

It may have been a long and winding road to their present home in Maine, but for Susan and Rufus Williams the destination was clearly worth the trip.