Susan Adams looks at the pleasure she's received from painting, and the ability to pass on her love of art

It's fair to say Susan Adams has always been an artist. Not just painting, which she's done for 35 years, but music, writing, poetry. "I have been blessed," she says.

Last Saturday, "Susan Adams: A Retrospective," opened at Pelican Art Gallery downtown. And earlier this week, Adams talked about her life's artistic path.

She paints in all mediums, but "watercolor was my first love, and my expertise." It's also, she acknowledges, "the most difficult. It's the only medium that moves on paper. You can't control it." She pauses, then adds humorously, "Well, I guess you could but you'd wind up with paint by number."

Growing up on the east coast, she was partly raised by her grandmother. "She was quite a good artist," Adams says, "and I hung out in her studio. Without her influence, I don't know if I would have had the confidence to go forward. She believed in me. She used to say, &‘You're going to have a hard time when you grow up, because you can do so many things.'"

Adams laughs as she recalls some of those "many things," rock musician, drywall taper, animating for Broderbund and Nickelodeon.

When she left animation to paint full time, it was a leap of faith. She had a good income. Could she pay the bills putting watercolor on paper, oil on canvas? But, "I was lucky. I started selling right away." She laughs again. "I bought a van and a canopy and … like a gypsy, I went on the road, selling paintings."

It might seem glamorous, a carnival life, but it was also hard work. By the time it got too tiring, she'd built up enough of a following, galleries and private clients, to make it.

She also taught. "Teaching is as much a part of my life as painting," although she began as a way to pay studio rent. "When someone suggested it, I said, &‘I can't do that.'"

But, despite her nerves, she felt her grandmother's hands on her shoulders and, "after that first day, I knew I could do it. It's been more rewarding than I ever dreamed."

Art of any kind, she says, is "a matter of showing up and doing it. If you want to get good at anything, it's just practice."

The perseverance, the dailiness is what students struggle with. "You don't paint that wonderful piece that's going over the fireplace after a few lessons … You have to paint through all of the bad paintings to get good. And it's hard to keep them going when they look it and it looks like hell." At least, that's what they see. Adams sees progress.

Linda Postenreider, owner of Pelican Art Gallery, says of Adams, "She was one of my mentors. I took classes when I got to Petaluma. It was so much fun … she is an incredible teacher."

There is, even after more than three decades, what Adams calls "that doubting voice, but it's part of the creative process. I'm not a person who waits for inspiration. I paint every day. Typically I'm in the studio by nine in the morning I do it whether I feel like it or not. It's a discipline."

If she waited for inspiration, she points out, "you wouldn't see that gallery exhibit!"

Even when she was working full time in animation, "I would get up early-early! I'd sneak out in my robe and slippers. Even if I just painted for 20 minutes, painted a leaf, it would be something. I couldn't keep myself from it. I couldn't not do it."

(Contact Katie Watts at argus@arguscourier.com)