Mobile artist Suzanne Damrich works with a blowtorch, a hot plate and cups of molten beeswax. She also plays classical piano, writes in journals, tends a garden full of butterflies and co-created an award-winning documentary about the monarch migration. To her, all of it is part of the same thing. “I believe in living a creative life. There is creativity in each of us — we just need to be open to the opportunities to tap into it,” says Damrich, a native Mobilian who describes herself as someone who “lives in the moment.”
Her path to becoming a working artist took decades, winding through social work, technical writing, motherhood and grief before arriving at the ancient, fiery medium of encaustic painting. Along the way, she says, every experience was quietly painting a path toward the creative life she had always wanted.
A Childhood Steeped in the Arts
Damrich’s father was a well-known Mobile veterinarian, and her mother, who was fluent in French, taught in her later years. “Growing up, they took us to the symphony, the opera and we traveled widely. The home was filled with art and we had a wonderful personal library,” she said. “I adored music and studied classical piano with the quintessential Tonsmeire School of Music for five years. We were exposed to the arts at an early age, and it positively impacted my life.”
She attended Auburn University, where she majored in social work. On the day she graduated, she married Dr. Michael Damrich, a cardiovascular surgeon. His residency took the couple to Houston, where she was hired to write technical manuals for Hewlett-Packard. She considers that job her first real step into a creative life. “It took a lot of creativity to transform those dull technical manuals into something entertaining!”
After seven years in Houston and a short, eye-opening stint in Saudi Arabia for Michael’s work, the couple moved home to Mobile to raise their family. She was not yet making art the way she had dreamed, but she had begun to see how each chapter was leading her there.
Painting Until Daybreak
With her husband’s demanding schedule, Damrich stayed home with their children. “Once they were school-age, I secretly began buying paints,” she said. She would go to bed early after the children were asleep, and when the inevitable midnight emergency call came for Michael, she would find herself wide awake and painting until dawn.
“I was clueless about what I was doing,” she admits. She would find a picture of something she loved and copy it. Then she took her first art class from B. Tucker. “It was fabulous, and I was hooked!”
As she painted, she discovered that her many interests fed one another. “As I painted, thoughts would pop into my head, ideas that otherwise would lie dormant, and I would jot them down in my journal. Or when I was stuck with a particular aspect of painting, I got the urge to run to the piano and play for a while, which somehow reconnected me emotionally to what I was trying to paint. But if that didn’t work, I would stroll outside and work in the garden.” She laughs about it. “To an outsider, it probably looks like I spend my day running in circles, but it works for me!”
Icons, Gold Leaf and the Stations of the Cross
For years, Damrich attended icon writing workshops at Camp Beckwith, the Episcopal retreat center on Weeks Bay in Baldwin County, and at the Visitation Monastery in Mobile. In the Eastern Christian tradition, icons are said to be “written” rather than painted, following centuries-old methods and symbolism.
“Those times were restorative, gazing at inspirational images and learning how to paint that traditional method. In particular, I loved learning how to apply gold leaf. I would paint duplicate icons over and over and give many away to friends or strangers because I was painting for sheer enjoyment.”
She kept taking every class she could fit in. “I had a great group of like-minded friends who were just as eager to learn as I was, and we either brought teachers to Mobile to teach us or we traveled to them.”
In 2010, both of her parents died within six months of each other. “They were my mentors for my creative life and we often spoke about developing intuition,” she said. In 2011, Dauphin Way United Methodist Church commissioned her to create a 12-image set of the Stations of the Cross as a memorial in their honor.
“This was an emotional time and painting was a therapeutic way for me to grieve.” Looking back, she says it reminded her once again that creativity had carried her through a crisis.
Playing With Fire: The Ancient Art of Encaustic
For roughly the past 15 years, Damrich has focused on encaustic painting, a technique that dates to antiquity. The word comes from the Greek for “burned in,” and the method involves painting with heated wax mixed with pigment. Some of the best-known surviving examples are the Fayum mummy portraits from Roman-era Egypt, which have kept their vivid color for nearly 2,000 years. The medium saw a modern revival in the 1950s, most famously through Jasper Johns, whose flag paintings used encaustic.
Damrich first heard about encaustic at an icon workshop. “The oldest image of Christ is encaustic — over 1500 years old. I told myself I would one day learn how to use the medium.” The famous sixth-century icon of Christ Pantocrator at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai is one of the oldest surviving icons and is painted in encaustic.
Her tools are a blowtorch and a hot plate holding cups of oil pigment dissolved in hot beeswax. “No bees are harmed!” she is quick to add. “The wax is the natural byproduct of the honey gathering process.” She brushes the hot, colored wax onto a rigid surface as she would with any other paint. “As it cools, it is easily manipulated with the torch and the colors meld together in unexpected ways. At this point, depending upon the subject, sometimes I carve into the wax to create the image.”
In other words, she literally plays with fire.
A Garden for the Monarchs
Damrich is also known for her butterfly garden. “I grow lots of different plants, but butterfly gardening is my favorite,” she said. She has designed butterfly gardens for several friends who share her concern about the disappearing habitat of the monarch butterfly, an important pollinator whose declining numbers have drawn endangered-species concern.
“The monarch is the poster child for all pollinators,” she said. Monarchs make one of nature’s most remarkable journeys, migrating between overwintering grounds in Mexico and breeding areas across the United States and Canada. “What you do for the butterfly restores the habitat for all pollinators.”
Along with Farin Whatley, she created The Mystical Migration of the Monarch, a film that premiered at the Crescent Theater in downtown Mobile. The response was so strong that they were encouraged to enter it in film festivals, where it won several awards and led to a trip to Mexico to document the migration firsthand. The film was expanded into a documentary that is available on YouTube.
For Gulf Coast gardeners who want to follow her lead, the basics are straightforward: plant native milkweed, the only plant monarch caterpillars eat, along with a variety of nectar-rich flowers that bloom from spring through fall, and avoid pesticides. The Gulf Coast is an important stopover for monarchs moving through on their fall migration toward Mexico.
Awe and Wonder
Damrich radiates positive energy, and she describes creative living as both exhilarating and restorative. “Painting is often a solitary pursuit and therefore, contemplative. When you are at your best, you are creating images from a place deep in your heart. There is a certain level of risk, exposing your innermost feelings,” she said. “It is gratifying when someone connects to your art.”
She has shown work in juried exhibitions in Chicago, Nashville and Atlanta. Her solo show at Sophiella Gallery in Mobile, as of 2023 her most recent, carried a title that sums up her outlook: “Awe and Wonder.”
“Being creative puts me in touch with something mystical and benevolent which sustains me,” she said. “It causes me to dwell in a space of awe and wonder. I like being curious about life — there is so much to be in awe of!”