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Susan Eby Glass
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Susan Eby Glass was born in Virginia and grew up in Pennsylvania, but has made Vermont her home for the past 11 years. Her parents loved to travel and took the family on trips to England, Mexico, Quebec, Costa Rica, and the American West.
Glass has enjoyed drawing and painting since she was a child. She earned a BA in Art with a focus on sculpture and painting from Goshen College in Indiana. “Though I studied art in college, I always thought I would be a writer when I grew up. Song lyrics, poetry, essays and novels feed my imagination. After college I wanted to paint, but I didn’t get motivated until I visited Charleston, the home of Bloomsbury painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in Sussex, England. Every surface of the house – walls, doors, furnishings and floors – is painted decoratively. I realized that I was afraid of making a bad painting. I saw that you have to dive in and sometimes like what you do, and sometimes not. The beauty is that you can always go back and try again – and that sometimes things surface that you didn’t know were there.”
Given her diverse interests, it is not surprising that writers and musicians are nearly as influential to her as other visual artists. Says Glass, “I usually listen to Irish music while painting, but also love jazz, folk and vocal music. The poets Billy Collins and Mary Oliver create wordscapes that I try to capture visually, and the design work of textile designers Anna French and Tricia Guild push me to think about how I use color and new ways to interpret classic imagery.” She has always admired the technique of Carl Larsson, John Singer Sargeant and Edward Hopper.
Today she lives with her husband and daughter in a tiny passive-solar home with a west-facing view of the Green Mountains. “We have slowly turned our meadow into a permaculture garden of herbs, fruit trees, perennials and vegetables, all intermingled. It’s ongoing and satisfying work that requires similar creative thought to painting – lots of thinking about colors, textures and shapes and how they go together.”
Glass’s studio is in a small saltbox barn full of books, clippings, fabrics and photographs. Her technique is experimental, combining collaged elements on canvas or board with paint. She uses hand-cut shapes to stamp into wet paint and achieves the textures she desires using both a palette knife and brush. She enjoys an active career in design with a home accessories business, but finds painting a natural complement.
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