Sitting in the porch room of her lakeside home, Susan
McLaughlin Rosen holds a sketchbook filled with six years'
worth of colorful drawings inspired by observations and close
encounters with wildlife seen in and around Taunton Lake.
Susan McLaughlin Rosen is a meticulous draftsman who has enjoyed
a long career in interior design working for architectural firms.
Having been based for decades in the urban canyons of New York
City, her sketches and schematics have augmented many an
architects' portfolio presentation to building committees for
hospitals, city schools, libraries, public offices, and even
state prisons.
"Simply put, I was a space planner," said Ms McLaughlin Rosen
during an early November interview in her Taunton Lake home where
she now enjoys semi-retirement and a welcome change of artistic
focus.
"I'm working just as hard, but it's for myself - and no more
deadlines," she remarked, perhaps thinking back to her
professional life in the city.
It has been an interesting, creative journey going from interior
design to illustration to cartooning to painting, but her skill
in drawing has been the foundation that supported each stage.
"After the architectural job, I next worked for a law office
producing endless drawings for cartoons in their weekly newspaper
as well as illustrating calendars as gifts for their clients and
staff.
"Then someone at the New York Law Journal saw my work, and
I was hired to produce one editorial design a month illustrating
the lead story. This was in addition to my cartooning job," she
said. "I was up every night until 4 am churning the work out."
The New York Law Journal job was her most prestigious and
challenging, though she never actually met her art director and
editor because she received her assignments by phone and fax.
"My boss would call me and outline the concept. Then I'd run with
it. They would pick up the finished drawing at my workplace. This
was a more complex assignment than drawing the cartoons, because
they never told me exactly what they wanted."
As if Susan McLaughlin did not already have enough on her plate,
she also enrolled in New York University where she earned a
master's in art with a specialty in painting.
Now living in Connecticut but maintaining her studio in the city,
she is free from the demands of two high power jobs. She paints
for pleasure in oils or acrylics and takes commissions from
greater Danbury area residents who want paintings of their homes,
their garden landscapes, their barns, their dogs, or "whatever it
is that is important to them," she says.
Painting What She Sees
When she begins a painting, Ms McLaughlin Rosen purposely selects
a large-size canvas that demands broader strokes and offers wider
horizons. She finds she spends less and less time penciling in
the outlines before applying the paint. It is Connecticut's wild
side and the artifacts of its rural heritage that fill her
painterly compositions.
Those carefully rendered architectural interiors for New York's
urban centers have morphed into apple trees, barns, flowers, and
old dilapidated outbuildings. The antique structures have
character and history, she says, not unlike the Taunton Lake
cottage built in 1917 that she and her lawyer husband, David J.
Rosen, have owned for the past six years. Mr Rosen is executive
vice president and CFO for a post production television
commercial company and divides his time between the couple's
Newtown home and New York City.
"Before we moved here, I was starved for a place like this, but I
just didn't know it," said Ms McLaughlin Rosen.
"What I especially love is seeing all the small decisions that
were made by previous owners. I don't want to disturb that."
She pointed out tall, branching trees that lend a cloistered
quality to the lakefront yard, and the big glacial rock covered
with moss and lichens that she sees outside her screen porch
window. Wild morning glories take over the garden in August, and
an un-pruned lilac bush threatens to intrude upon their southern
view of the lake.
"But I hate to change or cut down any of it," she admitted.
Part of the reason she feels this way might be rooted in her
recollections of summers growing up, spent on Lake Candlewood in
Brookfield. Though she lived in the New York suburbs of Colonial
Heights, she spent every summer vacation from the age of 5 in the
Candlewood Lake house that her father built.
"He started with a shell and over the years, he and my little
brother finished the wood paneling and interior. I remember for a
long while we had no heat and huddled in front of the fireplace
to get warm. You know how it is. Your front half is nice and
toasty, and your back half is freezing."
Remembering those early days, she feels very lucky to have ended
up in a house on Taunton Lake in Newtown. When she was in her
30s, she thought of her self as a "city girl," but friends
commented that her drawings had "a woodsy look."
"I had no idea why that was, but now I think I understand," she
said.
Drawing pictures was always something she always enjoyed doing.
"My mother and grandmother saved everything and I can see where
my drafting skills began to develop. I credit my hand-eye
coordination to my father, who was a surgeon."
After two years in college studying liberal arts, she transferred
to the Parsons School of Design and majored in environmental
design.
"That's where I learned everything that goes along with that
field--renderings and projection drawings. Then I began my work
as architectural designer. But I knew I always loved drawing
better, and I knew I could be an illustrator."
While doing architectural drafting, she worked only in outlines.
"Everything was very technical and hard-edge. Now I want
everything to look totally natural, like a human being never
touched it."
Keeping A Day Book Of Nature Sketches
Susan McLaughlin has a small spiral bound sketchbook that holds a
place of honor on her porch coffee table. It is a lovingly kept
visual diary including written comments alongside the colorful
sketches recording observations of life along the Taunton Lake
shore. Flipping through the pages, each drawing suggests a story.
"I watched that great blue heron while he was hunting."
"I was wearing my straw hat out in the garden. A spider dropped
down off the brim hanging on its thread right in front of my
face."
"I picked up a thick chunk of moss and found all these worms were
hiding underneath it."
"Our cat, Blossom, had a face-off with this mouse. For a long
time, neither one of them moved. They just looked at each other."
She has drawn cormorants drying their wings, the lilac tree bent
to the ground after a storm, two Japanese beetles on a rose, a
turkey vulture feeding on a dead fish, and her dog chasing the
swans and barking at chipmunks. Bits of the outdoors - dried
pressed flowers, feathers, rocks and stones -are transported
inside to her kitchen table and kept there for further study.
The paintings that occupy her time are either commissions, or
they are her own ideas sprung from the area landscape, gardens,
and old structures she sees around her. Ms McLaughlin Rosen works
in her kitchen under a large double window with a northern
exposure, and she loves the spaciousness this provides, as
compared to the cramped quarters of her New York studio.
Perhaps her second favorite place in the Taunton Lake home is the
screened-in porch, an add-on to the original cottage that a
previous owner had fitted with jalousie windows on three sides to
provide an all-seasons view. The room is filled with comfortable
wicker furniture.
"I feel so close to nature out here. When there's a breeze, it's
ten percent cooler than in the house."
Ms McLaughlin Rosen applies the same concentration and focus to
her work that she once used to produce an architectural rendering
or a black-and-white cartoon designed to amuse subscribers to a
weekly law journal. Except that now, her technique as well as her
subject has changed. The execution is less about precision and
more about the freedom to follow her creative instincts.
"I paint what I see. Then before long, I am thinking only about
the paint and the colors.
Like I just know when a sky has to be yellow," she said.
Recently, she has received commissions for landscapes and
architectural paintings from several area residents. For example,
after visiting a property in Roxbury, she felt the idea for a
painting take hold and, "I could not stop thinking about it."
"While driving to the city, I was visualizing my client's 12
acres of land and the hills around it, thinking about how the
trees met the sky and what lovely patterns they made. When it's
all in my head and I'm sitting down to work, my hand takes over.
"I work a long time on a painting and my husband, David, will
say, 'I think it's done now,' but sometimes I keep going. I like
to mess it up a little," she added.
"In the back of my mind, I'm always preparing for a show where
I'll put all these paintings together and see what I've done."
Susan McLaughlin Rosen can be reached at her New York studio
at 212-879-9584.