Biography
Sue Fierston is a printmaker, painter, and muralist with a studio at Artists and Makers in Rockville, Maryland. In June 2019, she will be teaching for the third time as an artist-in-residence at Yosemite National Park and she teaches regularly at the annual conference of the Nature Printing Society. Sue is at work on Garden Meditations, a major public art installation for the Lombardi Cancer Center in Washington, D.C. Garden Meditations is an outdoor project, linking a healing garden and hospital surgical center, covering 18 nine-foot high columns in prismatic color.
The natural world, its colors, shapes, and scale influences all of my art. The monumental scale of Yosemite's El Capitain reminds me of the difference between huge and tiny as I stand on the valley floor with my easel. Printing real fish shows me that the surface of each fish is a unique pattern of delicate scales that we do not otherwise see. And printing real leaves emphasizes the unusual, irregular shapes that even a familliar leaf, like a maple, can take.
I took the sunlit variations of summer flowers and leaves as my inspiration for Garden Meditations, a public art project designed to relieve the stress of patients, hospital staff, and caregivers at the Lombardi Cancer Center and to enliven a well-traveled concrete plaza. The view of the project depends on the path one takes through the open-air plaza, as each four-sided column is painted in a different shades of a base color.
My paintings and prints are currently on view at SR/A La Collection gallery in Chevy Chase and Happy Isles Art and Nature Center in Yosemite National Park. I have taught at Brookside Gardens and the U.S. Botanic Garden, and my work has been on exhibit there as well at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda and MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC.
My prints and paintings can be seen on my website: suefierston.com and on Instagram at: @suefierston_leaves_three_ways.
