Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/433799
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 2 0 8 In Her Element When Sporting Classics last caught up with oil painter Linda Besse (see May/June 2013 issue), she had just completed a 459-mile paddling expedition on Alaska's Noatak River above the Arctic Circle with the Wilderness River Art Expedition Foundation. Her adventures north also include annual visits to Manitoba—a treasured source of inspiration—most recently this past September. "I was with my husband who was snow goose hunting in polar bear country on the shore of Hudson Bay," she says. "We'd seen polar bears walk right into a blind and take a recently bagged bird or two. Fortunately, each time we were not in the blind, but you always wonder. It certainly makes snow-goose hunting a whole new sport! Being on the ground with polar bears during the spectacle of the snow goose Shoulder-to-Shoulder Being the wife of John Seery-Lester might daunt many an artist, but not Suzie Seery-Lester. Along with her talented husband, she's the co-recipient of the 2014 Simon Combes Award for Conservation, bestowed upon the couple at the Artists for Conservation festival this past September in Vancouver. Perhaps her previous line of work as the first female SCUBA instructor in the CIA—in which she trained President Ford's Secret Service cadre and CIA and FBI agents as well as Army divers, and Navy SEALS—helped her develop toughness in a male-dominated environment with her feminine grace intact. "I did things I never did, in places I've never been, with people who don't exist," she says with her signature mountain-brook-tumbling-over-rocks-laugh. She discovered her love of painting in the early 1990s, meeting her soulmate John at a 1993 wilderness painting workshop in Guatamala. "Today, we still do everything together," she says. "We work near each other in our in-home studios, teach, lecture, travel. Creatively, we enhance each other." While John focuses on bold, powerful renderings of rare and exotic moments, Suzie leads our eyes to an intimate view—one that urges the viewer to slow down, to study, to become immersed in the beauty of small, gentle moments around us, such as in Snowy Sentinel, a Zen-like study in the subtleties of white-on-white, where she leads our eyes to follow the clumps of grasses in the snow to discover a snowy owl nearly camouflaged in its surroundings. Lately, Suzie is exploring blues and greens as well as reflections (she was first a diver, after all). "I'm working almost exclusively in acrylics," she says, "for the transparent, shimmery effects I can achieve." Birds—always an adored subject—abound in her new work, as does her mastery of texture, evidenced in the weathered barn wood, aging docks, and rusting metal tools that provide visual contrast to the airy avians. In Sublet Blues, a new painting in a near-miniature size of 9 x 12 inches, a bluebird has built a nest in an old pitchfork nestled among a cluster of antique farm tools that lean against a log barn. "I saw that barn in Wyoming," she says, "and it gave me the inspiration for the painting." In addition to her painting and worldwide travels, Suzie earned her Florida loggerhead turtle researcher– rescuer certification and six months out of the year spends mornings on Casey Key, recording loggerhead activity for Mote Marine Laboratory. S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 2 0 8