Portrait of the Artist as a Digital Diva

Written By Patricia Rouzer

With lively blue eyes, silver-flecked, long, brown tresses, dressed in a modestly Bohemian jacket over black slacks and blouse, Sue Ruddick Bloom looks every inch the artist and college professor that she is. Beneath that comfortable, mid-life, academic veneer, however, lurks a digital diva, an electronic artist who dances on the cutting edge of photography’s newest technology.

Classically schooled in the fine arts, Sue Bloom is skilled with brush and palate, charcoal and clay. But although many of her artist colleagues eschew the computer-come-lately medium of digital photography as mere “graphic art,” Sue embraces it with gusto. It enhances her work, and her work enhances photography’s standing as a serious artist’s medium.

Sue’s approach to digital photography mirrors her approach to life — open, curious, warm and enthusiastic. It is an approach fostered early in an only child who appeared born to the world of art.

Her talent comes from nature and nurture. Sue’s father Earvin,?85, ?a cabinetmaker?and shop forman for the U.S. Government,?still makes frames for her photographs, paintings and drawings. Her mother, Dorothy?, 82,??is a talented?amateur artist who??has always?encouraged Sue’s talent.?“Art was always supported in our home,” she said.???

Sue’s interest in art? was never forced. “When I was a child I was always drawing,” she said, “When I was five my mother asked me if I would like to take lessons at the Maryland Institute.”?

?Armed with all of half a decade of life experience, the child artist was up to the challenge. Thus began weekend treks to Baltimore with her parents that included not only art lessons, but trips to museums, visits to the city’s sights and the chance to rub elbows with people from a far less homogeneous social and ethnic society than could then be found at home.

It was a creative pebble tossed into a boundless cultural pool. The ripples of those lessons continue to expand today as the now mature artist focuses her technical skills and trained eye on exotic places, exploring people, society, history and philosophy.

After graduating from Westminster High? School she earned her bachelor’s degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She began teaching at what is now McDaniel College, and when the chair of the Art and Art History Department came open, she decided she wanted it. Sue returned to MICA to earn her MFA, the highest degree granted in fine art and a requirement to become a college department head. She has been at McDaniel for 21 years.

Her Carroll County roots clearly continue to influence her work. Although her portfolio includes a variety of international seascapes, landscapes, portraits and collages, her inborn fondness for home– sweeping vistas, old farms and earthy pursuits–pays homage to roots sunk deep in the country.

Currently, one of Sue’s passions is photographing fox hunting. The Carrollton Hounds, a local group that pursues old Reynard across the county’s dwindling countryside, is among her favorite subjects.

The sights and sounds of the??scarlet-coated masters and whippers-in, the tan and white hounds singing at the scent of a fox, stir the artist.

“It is fascinating to think that people have been doing this for hundreds of years in much the same way,” she said. But although she loves the sport, she also loves the fact that in this county it is largely no longer a blood sport. “I’ve never been out on a hunt where a fox was injured or killed.”

Amish schools in nearby Pennsylvania are another subject that attracted her artist’s eye and appealed to her agrarian proclivities. The simplicity of Amish culture and the Mennonites’ ability to separate themselves from modern life, even as it bustles around them, sparked Sue to do a series of photographic studies. Several of her Amish studies were hung as part of a faculty exhibition at McDaniel immediately before the brutal slayings that took place in early October–an event that left her sad and shaken.

“I thought that I had photographed that particular school. I had pictures of children standing outside, looking straight into my camera,” she said. She learned, with some relief but little comfort, she had not.

Homebody and world traveler, Sue is both accomplished artist and contented wife and mother. Her now grown daughters, Sara, 31, a surgical resident at Georgetown University Hospital, and Emily, 28, a graphic artist who is married and lives New Hampshire, are the obvious joys of her life.

Sue looks forward to someday becoming the grandmother of what is sure to be “the world’s most photographed baby.” But with the patience that accompanies the art she creates, she acknowledges “that is something that is completely beyond my control.”

A bona fide international expert in her field, Sue is the author of a two inch-plus-thick tomes, Digital Collage and Painting: Using Photoshop and Painter to Create Fine Art, published in June by Focal Press, that is “selling well” around the world. She also writes a blog for a new website, www.eons.com, designed to appeal to aging baby boomers.?Her blog is aimed at helping??middle aged?hobbyists maximize the results of their digital photography.

More than 20 years ago Sue sensed the promise that digital photography held as a new medium for her expression. “I started with the first Mac–it had all of 128k of memory,” she said. She began to experiment.

Today she creates images she could not have imagined in the early days of the technology. With patience, skill, state of the art equipment and an artist’s eye, she applies a variety of techniques to her photos, turning them from stark digital representations into the softest of watercolors and vibrant oils–complete with texture born of impasto techniques that the viewer would swear were rendered, not with computer stylus, but with a palette knife.

Her work is not without whimsy and humor. Musing about “what is in that water” in Venice’s legendary canals, she digitally floated a Florida alligator, perhaps representative of Venice’s legendary pollution, in her classic shot of the city’s romantic waterways.

Sue speaks without pretension of flying to New England for the weekend, of traveling to Europe for the spring semester, of exotic places she has photographed. She regularly leads tours and workshops in Greece, Turkey, Italy, Scotland, Morocco, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium and England–as well as various areas of the United States.

Clearly she enjoys the travel, but returning home to the bright, white open spaces of the hilltop studio near Westminster that her husband, Cal, a Westminster barber, built adjacent to their home, brings even greater joy.

There she creates, from a simple photographic landscape, work that pays homage to Monet in its colors and soft rendering. Or she painstakingly pieces together hundreds of shots to form panoramic scenes–her particular specialty–of a blessing of the hounds, the Scottish moors, a Venetian waterscape. “There is software that lets you put together several photographs into one scene, but it never quite looks right,” she said.

Obviously, Sue Bloom seeks perfection, but there is nothing of the anguished artist in her. At home in her own skin, she is confident in her craft. Her accomplishments are impressive, but Sue appears unimpressed. She is the favorite neighbor you would like to invite for tea–if she isn’t off shooting in Scotland.