The Captivating Art of Suzie Seerey-Lester

Ever-so-gently, I graze my left index finger across the roseate spoonbill’s extended primary feathers, as translucent as rose-tinted stained glass against the backdrop of the bay flats on which it feeds and feel an electric thrill pulse from my fingertip to my heart.

Its spatulate bill is poised just above the surface, while the bills of the three roseates trailing it – a second adult and two juveniles – stir up foamy frills of saltwater as they greedily swish their spoon-shaped bills in the shallows, seeking small invertebrates, crustaceans and fish. The birds’ reflections undulate like a fun-house looking-glass on the otherwise placid bay. The gauzy horizon is misty and ethereal, with delicate cumulous clouds mirrored in the bay below and a near seamless union of sea and sky joining the two. Although a haze hangs over the water, the birds glow with luminescent light. Anyone who’s seen that light on the Gulf Coast knows it.

This is not a real spoonbill I’m touching, of course, just a very real, very awe-inspiring work of art.

I’ve driven more than 150 miles of Texas Hill Country roads just to see it, after speaking with its creator, Suzie Seerey-Lester, the day before. Suzie, who resides in Osprey, Florida, shares my love of roseate spoonbills. This magnificent creature was driven to the brink of extinction during the plume trade of the late 19th century, but since the early 20th century, has successfully recolonized along the entire Gulf Coast. It’s a totem bird for her, as it is for me.

Suzie’s roseate painting, Reflections in Nature, shares gallery space with another of her works, Morning Assembly, a flock of gulls on the roof of a weathered barn, at the Insight Gallery in Fredericksburg, Texas. They are but two paintings in a prolific body of work that for Suzie was first a stress-relieving hobby before propelling her down her destiny’s path to become a full-time painter and to meeting and marrying John, her husband of 25 years who passed away in 2020.

Flashback to the early ’70s: A young, willowy, athletic blonde with a warm, deep laugh and an innate sense of her own authority stands in a full-body wetsuit before a group of men. The men are President Gerald Ford’s Secret Service cadre, and the woman is Suzie. She – as a certified instructor for the CIA – is teaching them SCUBA diving prior to Ford’s Bermuda vacation, so they can guard him effectively.

Suzie was employed by the CIA where she was the youngest-ever female diving instructor in the CIA at the time. “It was a situation in which I did things I never did, in places I’ve never been, with people who don’t exist,” she recalls. In addition to the CIA and Secret Service, she spent many hours working and training scuba-certified FBI, park police, while working and training Navy Seals and Army divers, altogether proving herself, and her physical strength and mental toughness in a truly male-dominated world while remaining true to her own feminine graces.

Then and now, painting has always been her release; her refuge. The process of painting is what fuels her; not the finished piece.

“I’m not interested in hanging on to my paintings after they’re done,” Suzie confesses. “The joy for me is to witness that moment and somehow put it on canvas. Photographs lie; they cannot always communicate what we actually see.”

When her CIA position began to become rather mundane (working “safe houses” in undisclosed locations all over the world can get pretty boring, she says), Suzie went to work in the private sector, continuing with her vocational passion for writing manuals, training people and her passionate avocation, painting.

“In the nineties, when I was working for DHL as a regional manager with a territory stretching from Arizona to Guam, I traveled a good deal but still kept taking art classes on the weekends,” Suzie says. “I loved to paint and I felt I was getting better.”

Suzie and John were married in 2000 and they did everything together.

“We worked close by each other in our in-home studios, taught, lectured and traveled. Creatively, we enhanced each other; we were together all the time, each spending nearly a hundred hours a week pursuing our passion.”

Painting is not the only passion John and Suzie shared. She is a licensed sea turtle researcher/rescuer who spends many mornings each year cataloging endangered sea turtile activity on a two-mile stretch on Florida’s Casey Key. John often tagged along, three-legged stool and gear in tow, to sketch and paint en plein air as Suzie cataloged the daily travails of loggerhead, green and other endangered sea turtles for Mote Marine Laboratory.

The Seerey-Lesters continued to travel extensively as well, teaching painting workshops around the country, such as the one sponsored by the Susan K. Black Foundation in DuBois, Wyoming, another at the Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, and yet another at the DDD Game Farm in Kalispell, Montana, in addition to the Master’s Class they conducted in Venice, Florida. Suzie’s work has been sold in auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in London, and she’s won numerous awards, including Artist of the Year from the Ocean Foundation.

But it’s the experience of the times afield with John she loved the most. “We enhanced each other’s creativity, often working more than ten hours a day, seven days a week in our studios, but we were doing what we loved to do. I especially love being able to see leopards and lions and other large predators up-close. Back then everything was a new experience, and we got to share it with each other.”

While John was deservedly revered for his powerful, incredibly executed renderings of rare and exotic animals. “He was a daredevil of sorts,” Suze recalls. “In Alaska, with an enraged grizzly bear hot on his heels, John raced for the RV only to find that his friend had rolled up the windows and locked the doors. In Africa, he was startled awake by a curious hippo rubbing against our tent. Even being surrounded at night by a pride of lions, his only protectlon was his little pup tent. Once in Yellowstone while fly-fishing, he was run out of the river by an angry bison.”

In her art, Suzie has always preferred to celebrate the small, quiet, everyday moments around us that are every bit important and eye-catching. An owl perched on the upper rafters of an old barn. A ringneck pheasant flushing from a patch of brush near a vacant, weather-beaten home. A great gray owl framed by the snowy limbs of ancient aspen.

And, of course, there is incandescent, sun-shot neon-pink of four roseate spoonbills feeding on a hazy coastal flat in a palpable quality of light a camera’s lens could never record. But through Suzie’s spirit, eye and hand, they are forever distilled in one perfect, intimate split-second.

Note: Contact Suzie Seerey-Lester by phone: 941-966-2163; by email: seereylester@msn.com. Or visit her website: www.seerey-lester.com