“I wanted to see mountains and vistas,” artist Suzanne M. Campbell says about her move to Arizona a quarter-century ago. “I needed a long view of my world. Also, I’d been living in Florida, and I hated it there.”
The Wisconsin native, whose oil paintings and jewelry will be exhibited in the Sonoran Arts League’s 29th annual Hidden in the Hills Artist Studio Tour this November, figures she’s been making art – and other things – her whole life.
“It started with crayons,” the self-taught artist says, “but by the time I was 6, my parents were giving me oil paints and canvases. When I said I wanted to sew, Mom taught me to use a knee pedal so I could make dresses for my troll dolls. She used to say I had a propensity for making stuff.”
Some of the “stuff” that Campbell has made includes the sofa in her living room, which she built and upholstered herself, and its needlework throw pillows. Nearby, there’s a carefully displayed pile of necklaces she’s made from ancient coral and bits of silver.
Primarily, though, Campbell is a painter of floral portraits, bursting with color and solemn intensity.
“I’m inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe,” Campbell says. “Her skies and flowers and cloud formations. She said she wasn’t a good painter, but she was a good visionary. We’re both from Wisconsin, and we both lived in New Mexico, and you can see how those places show up in our art.”
Much of that art will be on display at artist Michele Malone’s studio as part of the Hidden in the Hills tour, November 21 through 30 (sonoranartsleague.org/hidden-in-the-hills).
– Robrt L. Pela
Read This
Plunder
If you loved reading Treasure Island as a kid and yearn for more (grown-up) tales of “buccaneers and buried gold,” you’ll enjoy Plunder (Club Lighthouse Publishing, $15), the fourth novel by Scottsdale author Douglas E. Pike.
The generation-spanning adventure begins in Havana in 1720, with a young man’s petty crime setting off a string of calamities starting with the death of the captain of the Estrella Norte, a treasure galleon bound for Spain.
Stowaways, a shipwreck, a rescue and an ambush keep the plot’s momentum going and the adrenaline pumping, and 250 years after the saga begins, a new generation takes up the mantle to find the Estrella Norte’s lost booty.
Pike, a longtime member of the National Cartoonists Society, made the pivot from cartoons to novels in 2016.
– Leah LeMoine
