Artist Mary Sue Palmqist - Sutter Creek Gallery presents Mary Sue Palmquist, the October featured artist at Sutter Creek Gallery, discovered a love of artistic expression in a high school art class with a daily lesson of portrait drawing. In college she majored in art, attending Ripon College and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design studying printmaking, graphic arts and typography, all before the advent of computers. In 1983, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art from Rockford College with an emphasis in watercolor.
Before Palmquist could follow her passion for art further, she took over managing the family business, an historic theater in Rockford, Illinois, used for performing arts performances, meanwhile taking evening classes in painting and calligraphy. After 18 years she went on to pursue the study of art therapy in a master’s program which led to teaching art in an after-school program until she moved to California in 2005.
She then took up her paint brushes and began studying watercolor under the tutelage of Sabina Turner, a local professional artist, as well as taking workshops and entering art shows and the local fair. Palmquist is primarily a watercolorist but enjoys melding various mediums to create texture and bring abstraction into her work. Lately, her favorite subjects are old buildings and old photographs. “There’s so much story in them,” she says, “that I love to imagine the essence of what was going on.”
Palmquist is a member of the Sutter Creek Gallery where you can visit with her during a reception in her honor on Saturday, October 1, from 2 to 5 p.m. She is one of twenty artists represented by the gallery located at 40 Main Street in the heart of Sutter Creek, open Thursday through Monday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. On display are original paintings of all types, photographs, prints and cards, jewelry, pottery and gourds. Custom matting and framing services are also available. For additional information, call 209-267-0228