The Blue Sea Artisans featured artist for the month of June is multi-media artist Sue Mailander.
Mailander was a Southern California beach girl duirng the 1950s and ‘60s. She took art classes at UCLA and Chouinard Art Institute, and was a skilled seamstress, tailor and knitter that lead her to take intensive workshops in Fashion Design at Los Angles Trade Tech. After a few years as a fashion coordinator, she found work in the garment industry designing ladies sportswear and was head of her department. She spent her off time scuba diving and living abroad and sailing in her small yacht in the Maina Del Ray neighborhood.In 1988, she bought a 5- acre macadamia nut farm “Karma Farm” on an old dirt road in South Kona.
Mailander joined the Kailua Village Artists in 1990 and was a member for almost 20 years. In 2009, she she left to become one of the founding members of the original Blue Sea Artisans Gallery in Kailua-Kona. She has been known on the Big Island over three decades of art in a variety of mediums, including acrylic paintings of coffee shacks and other local images. Mailander went on to learn woodcut printmaking at Donkey Mill Art Center, and she has a wall full of woodcut carvings of which she is very proud of. Handmade prints of her woodcuts are available at the gallery. Currently she combines these and other mediums in works of luscious colors and patterns, and in a new smaller format with colorful sticheries called “Sachiko”.
Mailander will be working every Wednesday in June from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The Blue Sea Artisans Gallery, located in the Keauhou Shopping Center, is open 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday.
Info: call (808) 329-8000.