Sue Hunter
by Audrée Peters

“Art is a creative flow of energy. You cannot force it. Sometimes it allows you to guide it. Often it takes you on a journey into the unknown. One moment you think you understand the creative process, the next moment you wonder if you will ever master the mystery. But it is the mystery that always brings you back to try again.” – Sue Hunter.

Artist Sue Hunter’s soft Arkansas accent still pulls on her words as she talks about her migration from Arkansas, where she grew up, to Boulder, Colo. and, finally, to Scottsdale, Ariz.

“In 1960 I moved from Boulder with my sister and her family. They moved back to Boulder, but I stayed down here,” she recalls.

Hunter is a dedicated artist and an art teacher. The walls of her home and studio are lined with her art work.

Her paintings often have a softly blended, impressionistic flare.

And sometimes they appear three-dimensional, because she paints in textured layers with a neutral background.

She explains the technique she uses to create this illusion with pastels.

“Even when I teach at school, I have them tone their paper, and then some of that color shows through, so it gives that layered, or vibrant, look,” she says.

Hunter is equally versatile in all the art media.

“I teach in all the media -- acrylics, oils, pastels and watercolors,” she says. “And teaching forces you to get into all those media yourself. But I would get bored if I only worked in one.

“I really like pastels (the most),” she admits, “but I like oil when I’m working in oil, watercolors when I’m working in watercolors, and all of them are different. Some of them are more messy than others. But you learn things from one, and you translate it over into another one.”

Her favoritism toward pastels, she says, is “because, I think, they’re so bright, and I don’t have anything to mix to get that. I like the oil and watercolor and acrylic, but you’re always mixing. With the pastels, it just goes on straight.”

Although she has several sets of pastels she uses, the large, shallow case she takes to her teaching classes holds dozens of shades of basic colors.

“And I really generate a lot of paintings,” she says, “between teaching and painting.”

Hunter often paints from her head, without an image to follow. Or she may photograph a tableau, subject or vista that strikes her, and uses it to start an idea.

“But it takes on its own character and becomes something very different,” she says.

“There may be something in the photograph that inspires me, and then I just start painting, and pay more attention to what the texture of the pastel is doing. And that’s how I work from a photograph. I just take the essence of what I want.

“I don’t copy the photographs. I get inspired by them,” she says. “If I showed you a photograph and the painting, you wouldn’t even know it was the same one.”

Having started painting at a later time in her life, Hunter does not take her art work for granted. It was something that she had tucked away in the back of her mind for many years. But first she got her college degree in business.

“I got a business degree because I was working for a company that helped pay for my classes,” she remembers.

“I was working at Honeywell,” she recalls, “so I didn’t paint for about 12 years while I was getting my degree. Then I went back (to school) and started watercolor and so forth, so although I have been painting for 20-something years, I don’t really count it,” she laughs.

“I had said I was always going to try watercolor, and that’s how I got into watercolor,” she adds, “although I did start in oils, also, and then something led to pastels.”

She took courses at the Scottsdale Community College and Scottsdale Art School, as well as workshops with dozens of artists, including many in Europe, in the ensuing years.

“And then I was in a show at Paradise Valley Community College, and someone said ‘You should teach at the school,’ so I started doing that.

“I thought I could teach and paint, but when you teach, you use up all of your energy, and it drains you of your creativity. Now I do eight weeks of teaching, then I’ll have about six weeks off in between to do my own thing.

“So I’ve just been evolving over the years,” she adds with a smile.

Hunter has been teaching watercolor and pastel art classes at Paradise Valley Community College for 10 years.

“And my classes are very popular there,” she says pleased. “They fill up quickly.”

Among the many other regular places she teaches are Fountain Lakes, Westbrook Village in Peoria, Sun City West, Pebble Creek in Goodyear, West Valley Art Museum, Wickenburg, and Shemer Art Center in Phoenix, where she displays her own art at their “Sunday at Shemer” program.

She also holds private classes in her studio at home.

“My husband thinks I just have a ball because when I have classes in my studio we laugh a lot in here,” she says. “But it’s hard work. He just sees the end results and doesn’t realize it takes hours.”

Hunter has also had private exhibitions all over the state and behond, including Sedona, Scottsdale, Cave Creek and Phoenix, as well as Oregon, New Orleans and Los Angeles.

She also has had solo exhibitions in many locations, including galleries in Scottsdale and Chandler, the Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce, the El Dorado in Sun City, and Camelback Flowers and the Coronado Café, in Phoenix.

“And I do demos and workshops for different groups,” she says.

She recently received recognition from her participation in the Arizona Pastel Artists Association 2006 Juried Art Show at the Fountain Hills Community Center.

She once won Best of Show at an Arizona Artists Guild show, and has won many other awards at various shows in which she has participated.

“All the shows I’ve entered are juried shows,” she says.

Hunter says she enjoys the teaching, “because you have the interaction. Otherwise, I think if I were stuck in my studio all the time, it would be really hard.”

“So I belong to different art groups also, and I get the contact and interaction there.”

And indeed, her interaction includes more than a dozen art leagues, guilds and associations in Arizona and beyond, including Arizona Artist Guild, Arizona Watercolor Association, Mid-Southern Watercolorists, Northern Arizona Watercolor Society, Degas Society New Orleans, Arizona Pastel Artists Association, Pastel Society of New Mexico, Phoenix Artists Guild, Desert Pastel Artists, Scottsdale Artists League, and Contemporary Watercolorists.

Hunter believes that the ability to create is what she loves about painting.

“I think you just forget everything except what you’re working on,” she says. “You go into another mode of some type. That’s why people say art is really good therapy, because you forget whatever is bothering you, and for two or three hours you’re just in some other place.”

Hunter can be reached at (480) 991-1634 or online at www.suehunter.net.