Wood Bud Monoprint. Susan Due Pearcy 1996	Winding country roads, cultivated fields, sheep and misty blue views of Sugarloaf Mountain at every turn. And art too. This October I joined the crowds to go to the Autumn Studio Tour of the Sugarloaf Guild. Six artists and artisans, (three of whom also refer to themselves as shepherds) who live in upper Montgomery country have opened their studios to the public three times a year for the last five years. MP member Susan Due Pearcy, the only fine artist of the group has joined for the past two years since her move to the area. Her light-filled studio and loft look directly at the mountain. Susan has new works, drawing and prints, most recently exhibited at Gomez Gallery in Baltimore, and at the Washington Printmakers Gallery. Older work, paintings, and photographic cards are in abundance, as well as jewelry and sewn vinyl purses and totes made by her daughter. The people seem to enjoy the outing and come to buy.
Susan has been a printmaker since the late 1970's. She began making prints in San Francisco, and shortly after studied with Robert Blackburn and Michael Ponce de Leon in New York City. After moving to the D.C. area she worked with Ann Zahn at Glen Echoe. Since 1983 she has been a part of a group sharing a press called the Graphics Workshop. Her prints are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Chemalier Museum, France, and the Pushkin Museum in Russia. A sketchbook of hers was recently added to the collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her recent work has been close studies of seedpods and other small natural objects, a subject revisited from a series in the 1980s. John Dorsey of the Baltimore Sun describes her field series as "distinguished by Pearcy's touch, which combines strength with delicacy; her fine sense of color, which makes these seed pods and similar forms look like products of the earth that they are; and her ability to create forms that are at once bold and curiously lyrical."" When I asked if she had country roots, Susan informed me she was raised in the city, St. Lewis, but spent over three years in a rural part of Georgia, during the civil rights movement, and also lived with farmers in California assisting the United Farm Workers.	Field Series #5 Charcoal, pastel, encaustic on paper Susan Due Pearcy 1996