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Upon the collapse of funding for this Job Core Program, she returned to Vermont where she was offered a job teaching public school art. Susan became the iterant art teacher for four elementary schools as well as a teacher in the senior high school art program. Although not trained for public school teaching and not planning to teach professionally, she thrived for five years, becoming briefly the head of the program and teaching adult education courses as well. Granted a sabbatical leave for 1975, she left for Arcosanti, Arizona. As a prototype city designed by Paolo Soleri and built by volunteer labor, the opportunity offered hard physical work and mental stimulation in the service of a visionary ideal. During this time in the Arizona high desert, she was part of a work crew, had administrative duties and then worked as ceramic bell maker for the Cosanti Foundation. The one-year sabbatical ran into three. Leaving Arcosanti was difficult but the need to resume personal work was a deciding factor. Upon return to Vermont her professional seniority had vanished, but did allow for one more year of high school teaching. Living in a rented and refurbished horse barn on Lake Hortonia, she decided to see if she could support herself by less teaching and more emphasis on artwork. So, she became a self-employed sculptor and an adjunct college instructor at Castleton State College for four years. Residual yearnings for desert atmosphere permeated much of the new sculpture that was shown at galleries in Vermont and California. In 1984 a full-time college position became available and she talked her way into the job, which had initially been given to someone else who broke contract. She worked her way up to Professor of Art and Chairperson of the growing Green Mountain College Visual and Performing Arts Department in Poultney, Vermont, where she taught Art History, Sculpture, Ceramics and Design. After marriage to lithographer Mel Hunter, she left the horse barn to reside in Ferrisburgh, Vermont, launch a gallery and finally assemble a ceramic studio that was not part of living quarters. Sculptural planters became the mainstay of her contribution to the gallery but subjects and motifs ranged from small, meticulously carved works of pure abstraction to semi figurative pieces. Spring semester breaks offered occasions to lead college groups to various European countries, to develop a familiarity with major art museums and diverse cultures. A Sabbatical leave was granted in 1991, she was chosen Outstanding Teacher of the Year in 1993 and was granted a second Sabbatical for 2001-02. A long-awaited visit to major sites in Egypt was the focus of that year and upon return to college, she gave an exhibition of sculpture and photographs based on her perceptions and travels. After twenty successful years, she 'retired' as Professor Emeritus to become a self-employed ceramic-sculptor, proprietor of Smith-Hunter Gallery and publisher of Mel Hunter greeting cards. Susan also designed garden sculpture for EarthBorn Designs of California and continues to design for Ancient Graffiti of Middlebury, Vermont. Susan's sculpture can be seen in various collections, the Delgado Museum in New Orleans, Green Mountain College in Vermont. Recent venues include:
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In 1950, Mel made up his mind to pursue a career in art and decided to teach himself illustration skills, which he did after work, on weekends and all other spare time, working at his kitchen table. Following three years of steady effort, the self-taught artist sold his first color cover idea to Galaxy Magazine. He also talked himself into a job as technical illustrator at Northrop, where he painted pictures for the Pentagon of advanced interceptors and pilotless bombers in hypothetical combat situations. During this time he was a member of a group of Science Fiction greats such as Isaac Asimov, Sprague deCamp, Robert Heinlein, Fred Pohl, Lin Carter, L. Ron Hubbard and John Campbell, Jr. among others. A year later he resigned and moved to New York as a free-lance illustrator for magazines and books. He launched a career of scientific illustration, doing such technically accurate subjects as 26 paintings of celestial objects in 1964 for the Hayden Planetarium and later recording such advanced technological developments as drawing board jet bombers, missile launchings at Cape Kennedy and a revolutionary lunar manned base. His scientific drawings and paintings appeared in dozens of major publications. In the early 1960's Hunter also wrote the documentary text and shot photographs for two successful books of photojournalism published by Doubleday; "The Missilemen" and "Strategic Air Command". He flew with SAC crews, talked with the pilots, stood on alert with them in Spain, flew a refueling mission about the Arctic Circle, sat in a honeycombed blockhouse observing the countdown on an Atlas SM-65 and traveled more than halfway around the world to get the full story-in text and photograph- of the men, the weapons and the strategy of Strategic Air Command. Mel spent fifteen years traveling the world on assignments as a major magazine and advertising illustrator specializing in the physical sciences, astronomy and advanced space and weapons technology. He produced over nine hundred drawings and paintings in those fields. In the late 60's, Mel owned and distributed the Cessna/Wren seaplane from the North Star Airpark in Brooklyn. After 17 years of successful science illustration, Mel moved from New York City to Chester, in southern Vermont during the summer of 1967. He established his home and studio in a farmhouse high on a forested hill where he began depicting the land, animals birds and changing seasons of his rural, semi-wild environment. During that first winter, he tells of having to wear gloves to eat dinner, since frigid wind blew through cracks in the walls. The following year, Abercrombie & Fitch Galleries and Massachusetts Audubon Society commissioned Mel to do a series of more than 130 watercolors of "Birds of the Northeast" and in 1070, he signed a contract with World Publishing Co. for the development of a series of 13 ecological books for children. Titles dealt with the beginning of the earth, mankind, plants, birds, mammals and insects. He produced an entire ecology calendar for General Motors in 1974. For the World project, Mel pioneered techniques for pre-separated color drawings using DuPont Mylar as a drawing surface. This process greatly reduced the cost of color-illustrated books and furthered his career by opening the way for his later fine art lithography prints. However, over the next four years, he created 54 editions using traditional stone lithography techniques. Since 1971, Mel received commissions for scores of multi-color lithographic editions Some of his publishers have been Circle Gallery, Roten Collection, Mill Pond Press, Franklin Mint, HMK Fine Arts, Fine Arts 260 as well as his own Atelier North Star and Polaris Press. In 1975, Mel and his wife moved to Grafton, Vt., a foundation-funded, revitalized community where he founded Gallery North Star and Atelier North Star. Over the next eight years Gallery North Star successfully featured prints from his then 82 limited editions and selected work from other artists. Mel did his own printing in the Atelier, at first using the traditional technique of drawing on thick blocks of Belgium limestone. This meant hauling stones which often weighed 400 pounds, in the trunk of his car to stone printing shops in New York. He made twenty editions in joint effort with Bank Street Atelier, Shorewood Atelier and Geo, Miller and Son of NYC. In 1976, a long-experienced and reliable stone printer-craftsman accidentally ruined an image by adding a few too many drops of sulphuric acid to the preliminary etch on the stone. The subsequent edition was coarsened and all had to be destroyed. It occurred to Mel that his work on Mylar for the book project could be adapted to the more complex and demanding images of his current lithographs. He equipped his research workshop to perfect his use of the revolutionary Mylar Method, using a Charles Brand hand-cranked press. In the same year, his #55 edition "High Meadow, Low Meadow" was his first full-color Mylar edition, produced at the American Atelier of Circle Graphics in New York. Mel published a lengthy, photo-illustrated article in American Artist Magazine, entitled "Revolution in Hand-Drawn Lithography" which caused the eruption of an intense dialogue in the lithograph world. A joint public statement of affirmation from artists Jamie Wyeth, Lowell Nesbitt and others who were using the new method as well as supporting statements from two Ateliers in New York, quelled the debate. Today, artists over the world use the method. In 1984, Mel's seminal hardcover textbook, "The New Lithography" appeared and is now a collector's item. In 1983, Mel moved his Atelier North Star to Burlington, Vermont, where he produced well over 100 new editions using these advanced methods. He has acted as Master Printer in the production of more than 200 editions for other artists and print publishers. Until 1989, Atelier North Star was operated as a high quality production shop and as a teaching facility where a number of shop assistants and work-study students from nearby University of Vermont art classes were able to study how the Mylar techniques work in the real world of production printing. After closing the Atelier, Mel continued to act as Master Printer for his own editions and those of other artists, using a prestigious printing facility in Northern Vermont. Although diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease in the 1990's, Mel continued working on new editions of lithographs, acted as Master Printer for other artists, and established a line of greeting cards reproduced from successful editions. He founded Polaris Press, Inc. to function as a publisher/distributor of Mezzographs, a special form of original lithographs, conceived by Neil Harpe, and technically developed by Mel. He began publishing Printthoughts, "a journal of commentary on the besetting problems in the printed image field" and founded The True Original Printmakers Association, 1996 (TOPA), dedicated to the "artist as the focal point of true original graphic printmaking", designing a step by step process for documenting the creation of any true original graphic print edition. Mel's work is in many collections and has increased in value over the years. Incomplete list of Corporate Collections
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