A wildlife artist walks her own wall in a co-op gallery.
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Six and three quarter minutes inside a cooperative gallery in Brattleboro, Vermont, walking the walls with the wildlife artist whose work is hanging on them. She talks the whole way and never stands in front of the lens.
She starts early. “I’m Jeannie Sutherland, and when I was 4 years old, I, I did a drawing of a turtle with a top hat”, she says, and the attention it got kept her drawing. High school was the fork, conservation or art: “I was trying to decide between that and art, and I stuck with the art.” The wildlife did not go away, it changed medium. “So I’m still including the wildlife conservation only in image form.”
The gallery is the part she is happiest about. “now I’m retired and I do my artwork, and I’m part of a cooperative gallery, which I absolutely love.” One of the co-ops before it was an eco-village: “I’ve belonged to so many communities, and it’s just my thing.” Selling interests her least. “I’m not really a business person per se”, she says, and of the paintings, “these are like my babies”, which makes her “like the Humane Society trying to find homes for my babies.”
The spring sale is slow and she knows the shape of the year: “January is the slowest month in the year for sales”, then February, then it lifts, and people are doing their taxes right now anyway. She sold two that day. Asked whether prints can be mailed, she is blunt, “I have prints, but like I said, I’m not a business person”, so nothing gets shipped. Mugs cover the rest, because “Sometimes people love my work, but they don’t want to put something on the wall.”
The engraving comes out of leftovers. “I had some light box dioramas, but I sold all of them”, the last a few days earlier. The rest she calls “wildlife wood scraps because I would have like pieces of wood left over”: a painting flipped into a print, then “I did some Photoshopping so that I put it on top of a dam and everything”, then the laser. She makes them at a woodworking community she calls Hatchspace.
The last stretch is where she lives. A skunk behind the house, a bear in the trash can, a landlord shouting and running off, and her standing there. “And I wasn’t scared.” Grizzlies are another matter, she says, but “Black bears are our friends.” She picks her preferred bear painting and shows the trick in it: “And his eyes will follow you.” Then she offers to show more work, says she does not want to take a picture, and the tape stops there.
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