Susan Porter is drawn to the details, whether it’s a shaded building, a fabric fold, or a funky storefront. The color and shadows, the light and the dark, inspire her.

“I’m really attracted to the relationship of colors with each other. They can react. One color can vibrate against another color, so it’s really interesting to see the colors juxtapose with each other,” said Porter. “No matter how hard I try, I always end up doing something with color and contrast in it.”

Painting has always been a part of Porter’s life. Her father, George Blackford, studied to be an artist at Yale School of Art before he was recruited during World War II. His work as a pilot for pan-American kept the family in Germany for four years. Porter became fluent in German until her English – filled with mixed tenses and incorrect sentence structure – sounded like it was spoken by a native German.

Blackford was an avid outdoor (plein air) painter and would take Porter and her brother with him, setting up an easel and paints for the pair. Porter recalled, “He’d come up with these beautiful plein-air watercolors and I would try to imitate and was totally frustrated.”

Porter’s father also encouraged her to go to art school, but Porter felt she needed a liberal arts degree at the time, a decision she now regrets.

“I should have gone to art school. I would have had a lot better art education as far as technical skills,” said Porter. “Who knows what I would have been doing now.”

Porter majored in advertising and design at Syracuse University and spent a summer studying printmaking and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria. She stayed in New York as an art director for Bozell & Jacobs Advertising, before coming to Maine to be National Fisherman magazine’s art director. In 2004, Porter settled in Boothbay Harbor and now splits her year between here and Sarasota, Florida. 

In Florida, Porter was introduced to oil and abstract painting. Unlike her father’s favored medium of watercolor, Porter finds oil more forgiving as she can continuously change the composition and color. She used to do her abstracts with oil and cold wax but preferred the easy layering of acrylics. 

‘You could start with just marks on a paper and turn it upside down and mark again, and then start adding your color or a collage. (Abstract is) really sort of a discovery process whereas a landscape is an attempt to create something that is pleasing to the eye but also representational.”

Abstracts also allow Porter to further explore color relationships, but she admits there’s one color she has trouble with. “Greens drive me crazy. They can be so hard to capture and there’s so many different variations.”

When Porter isn’t painting, she enjoys spending time with her family and going out on one of her three small boats: Brig, Elise (after her daughter) and Popcorn (named by her grandson. Porter suspects he may have been saying “foghorn.”) She also hopes to refresh her German or learn Spanish to better communicate with her Spanish son-in-law and bilingual grandchildren.

“It’s interesting. Painting for me can be a reward, but it’s also a struggle. When you’re doing it, it’s great because that’s all you’re concentrating on but it can cause a lot of anxiety because you’re afraid you’re going to make the wrong move. But in the end, it’s really gratifying coming up with something, a subject you’re attracted to and a result you’re happy with.”

Porter’s work is on display at Boothbay Region Art Foundation.