Suzi Thayer grew up in Sanford and began taking weekly art lessons at the Brick Store Museum in Kennebunk at age 10. Thus began a weekly regimen of art classes and workshops in different locations around Sanford that continued through high school. Her greatest childhood mentor was Cal Wilson, a painter and brilliant woman who introduced her to oil painting when she was 16.

Thayer majored in art at the University of Southern Maine, where she furthered her oil painting skills under the guidance of professor and painter Juris Ubans.

She came to Boothbay Harbor for the first time the summer after her sophomore year in college, and returned the next summer, when she met a sailor and changed the course of her life. Instead of returning to college for her senior year, she married the sailor and sailed to the Caribbean that fall.

She was never without a sketchbook over the next few years of sailing on a 100-year-old schooner out of the harbor, and crewing on a 60-foot ketch from Boothbay Harbor to the Caribbean each fall. She continued to sketch and paint, with oils and acrylics, anything and everything that interested her.

Sometime during the early ’80s she switched from painting oils and acrylics on large canvases to smaller, more attainable watercolors. As any painter will tell you, it’s not an easy transition. There is a huge difference between applying thick paint to canvas and watery color to paper. But it was love at first stroke.

Thayer has been working as a graphic artist for various newspapers since the early ’80s, but has continued to paint watercolors, and her work has been shown in various places around coastal Maine.

She has worked at the Boothbay Register for 10 years, writing about local characters and new businesses, and paginating the paper.

Her life outside the Boothbay Register is spent with her little dog, Elliot, and her two kitties, Pokie and Ruby, at her bungalow in Edgecomb. Weekends during the summer she can usually be found at her family cottage in Cushing, with her mother and other family members, and various and sundry wanderersby. The 100-year-old cottage on the St. George River is really the place she calls home.

Because of her early training in oils, as some of her watercolors indicate, Thayer sometimes uses watercolor like oils or acrylics, laying the paint on thick, rather than watery. And watercolor law dictates that the only white in a watercolor should be the paper shining through. She uses white paint - a no-no with purists - for highlights or to lighten an area. But she’s a rebel. One watercolor rule she does abide by is to not use black paint, which is taboo. The “black” seen in these paintings is a mixture of alizarin crimson and winsor green - which together produce a beautiful luminous “black.”

Though art has never been her way of living, it has always been a major part of her life, and though she’s never been under the illusion that she’s a great painter, or even a serious one, she does take her painting seriously. She never feels as “at peace” as she does when painting, and wishes she could devote more time to it.

The Southport Memorial Library is open Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. with evening hours Tuesdays and Thursdays 7 - 9 p.m. The phone number is 207-633-2741.