‘Time on the brush’: 77-year-old artist paints one watercolor a day during pandemic
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AUSTIN, Texas (KXAN) — A 77-year-old Texas artist used her time during the pandemic to paint while in quarantine and kept at it each day — literally.
Sue Taylor, a watercolorist in Austin, has been creating paintings since March 17, 2020, when the city first went into lockdown.
Her goal has been one painting per day while quarantine lasts.
“I figured, about 40 days is about all this will last and then it kept going on and on and on and months moved into the summer, the fall, through Christmas,” Taylor said.
She is closing in on 365 watercolor paintings as Austin’s lockdown one-year anniversary approaches — a series she has dubbed the “Quarantine Collection.”
On the back of each painting, she has a title, number and date of when she completed the watercolor. They’re in a big box, all in order. Many of the paintings focus on nature, places she’s visited, settings around town, as well as animals and plants.
Taylor also gets ideas from ripped-out pages of magazines and Facebook.
“People post all of these inspirational photos and I go, ‘Oh, I like that!’ So I save the photo and then print it off and paint it,” she said.
She has posted each watercolor painting on her Facebook page. A collection of friends anticipates her posts each day.
“They know around 5 o’clock in the evening I’m going to post this photo and that is also proof I have done every single day, one of these photos, one of these paintings, and they just love the paintings. They comment on them and it’s made me closer to a lot of my relatives and not-so-close relatives… and it’s just wonderful. It’s brought me so much pleasure from that.”
“People are happy to look for this. They go, ‘Oh, this one’s gorgeous, Sue! Oh, I love the colors…’ And I go, ‘Yes, that’s wonderful.’ It just makes me feel good inside, that I’m helping people through the pandemic that we’re in by giving them small little particles of joy.”
Once she reaches March 17, 2021, she will stop painting one per day. However, she plans to start painting larger canvases and work on them over longer time periods. She has sold some of her “Quarantine Collection.”
If you’re interested to buy one of the watercolors, you can email her from her website, where you can view the entire collection. She hopes to buy more paint, paper and brushes with the money.
