Susan Hope

121 N. Churton St. Hillsborough, NC 27278

I guess I have been making things forever, and I truly can't say which medium I like best unless you ask me which one I like best today. I'm so in love with color and all the fascinating ways it can be applied, manipulated and mixed...paint, glass, glaze, enamels, dyes, fibers, fabrics, yarns, threads, metals...all the same stuff. Really, I just love capturing detailed snapshots of gloriously unique combinations of colors...or shape... forms... places...ideas...

It all began long before I can remember. I grew up on a sheep farm in the Kittatinny Mountains of New Jersey. My first painting is still hanging in my parents’ home. My first loom, which I used and abused at 5, is sitting, in all its plastic glory, in my attic. My first art lessons were by mail (remember the 'draw the guy on the matchbook cover ads?), before I was 10 and it snowballed from there.

Before I knew it, I was out of college, yeah, with a BFA degree...“ ‘Art...what DO you do with that?’ they asked" ... (shrugs shoulders)... married the most patient man in the world, had five incredible children, and became the shepherdess of them and all the farm critters.

Everhope Farms and Design Studio were established in 1985. While the gang was young and we were home schooling, our creativity expressed itself through crayons, blocks, cookies and an amazing number of crafts like weaving and spinning, knitting …things kids can't get hurt with…(not to mention we had tons of wool from the flock of sheep). Along the way I had creative outbursts, sometimes very serious like the three years I spent doing biological illustration at a the University of Tennessee, sometimes, it was just plain fun…repairing the hand-stenciled designs around the ceiling of a room in an incredible ante-bellum home in Mississippi…or hugely challenging, as was the creation and construction of a 5’x 28’ stained glass window for a church in Hillsborough.

Then, suddenly, my companions were almost all grown...and I was in the studio by myself again…

There are many peaceful two and four legged friends nibbling their way around the fields outside my studio windows. My eyes wander the hills as I try to grasp the elusive energy of a design in process…maybe it will be fused glass, or maybe hand-dyed silk and wool….no, this time I need my pastels…this one is a painting. Every day contains a unique palette of images… a never-ending supply of information waiting to be assembled…waiting for inspiration...the flow of the Spirit....creative adrenaline.

I hope you enjoy the artworks here...and that they bring you life...joy and peace...there is ever...HOPE.

Susan Hope