The Waldo presents the retrospective exhibit “Multiples of Three: Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures” by the late Suzanne Cooney Phillips (August 1943 - March 2025), opening on Sept. 7.  The exhibit is in the theatre’s Alfond Gallery at 916 Main St. in Waldoboro and runs through Sept. 30.  

On Thursday, Sept. 18, the family will host a reception from 2 to 4 p.m. at the gallery immediately following a 1-2 p.m. memorial service at the Broad Bay Congregational United Church of Christ, also in Waldoboro.

The show highlights the breadth of Phillips’s work, made over several decades. Phillips was a prolific artist who showed in galleries throughout Maine and other states. In recent years she was a long-time member of the Downtown Gallery in Union, Maine, a collective of 12 modern artists and sculptures. Her paintings were avidly collected.

This exhibit is a rare opportunity to view the span and depth of her work. Phillips worked freely in many mediums, from watercolors, oils, acrylics, and pastels. She also sculpted with stone as her medium. As her family will attest, she was a tireless artist, always with a pencil in her hand and a sketchbook in front of her. This retrospective exhibit puts light on her practice as an artist and her poetic and emotional engagement in the physical world. 

About 40 paintings and sculptures are on display, structured thematically in eight sections: rockscapes; islands; fables; portraits; animals; streetscapes; still lifes; along with expressionist and abstract compositions. The result is her cumulative vision. 

She once wrote that she hoped “I might succeed in bringing an unexpected feeling of surprise and renewal to the viewer.”

Her work at The Waldo displays the emotional range of the many artistic genres and styles she used -- from her early, luminous still lifes to her later dark, sometimes harsh, expressive landscapes of rocks and islands, and in between, her more intimate, extraordinary paintings of family, even pets. Also on view is her unusual series of expressionist fables in black and white.

In an artist statement that did not vary over the years, Phillips explains her process as being an investigation to discover underlying truths.  “I am drawn initially to an image which inspires in me a feeling of recognition and empathy…and then I embark on a lengthy investigation which may take many shifting and changing paths,” she wrote.  Through her studies and inquiry, she was able to reveal the complexities of seeing. As art critic Philip Isaacson noted in a 2002 juried exhibition, Phillips was a painter “with a poetic, other-worldly way of recording the borders that we are all asked to cross.”

Suzanne Phillips Cooney has shown in juried exhibitions and galleries such as Spectra I . Westbrook College, Portland, 1979; Spectra II, Carnegie Gallery, University of Maine, Orono, 1982; Maine Coast Artists Annual Juried Show, Rockport, 1984 (today, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland); Maine Art Gallery, Wiscasset where in 1988 she was awarded the Best in Show at the 47th Annual Juried Exhibition; Caldbeck Gallery, Rockland; Harlow Gallery, Hallowell; Franciska Needham Art Gallery, Damariscotta; River Arts in Damariscotta (previously in Newcastle); and College Hall Art Center, Montpelier, Vermont, just to mention a few. 

She studied art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Columbia University, New York (where she also did coursework in Art History and in Russian literature and language). She also studied at the Art Students League and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. In 1988 she won a fellowship at the prestigious Vermont Studio School, Johnson, Vermont.  

The Waldo Theatre Gallery is open before events, and by appointment. To make an appointment, please send an email to: info@thewaldotheatre.org. 

The Waldo Theatre is located at 916 Main St. in Waldoboro.