The collected experiences of Susan Bridges

If a child artist, business person and star-struck student traveler merged into one woman, the result might be Susan Bridges, the 59-year-old executive director of the Art League of Bonita Springs.

FLORIDA WEEKLY PHOTO / EVAN WILLIAMS Susan Bridges, executive director of the Art League of Bonita Springs The league, on 10 scenic acres off Old US 41 Road, turns 50 next year. The group brings local and international art shows and theatre, and is planning a 17,000 square foot expansion. Its facilities for children, workshops and adult classes ($8 per hour for members) already rival that of many colleges.

"You'll meet a senior citizen who'll say, 'I wanted my entire life to do this,'" Bridges said. "It might sound kind of trite, but it's true. They worked full time, paid off their mortgage, their kids are gone and now they get to do this one thing they always wanted to do."

Bridges said she's been doing that "one thing" - creating art - since childhood.

Her mother was a stenographer in Chicago before computers were used, and when she finished recording a court case, she was required to tear out the extra pages in the back of the pad. She brought them home for her daughter.

Bridges filled the pages with all the pictures in her imagination, and kept them in the bottom drawer of her bedroom dresser. The drawer became stuck it was so full, and one year her mother yanked it open. Faced with all those foreign-looking shapes, some darkly shaded, created at the hand of her own daughter, Bridges said, "She kind of flipped out."

The vice principal at the family's school told her mother there was nothing to worry about psychologically, but her daughter might benefit from art classes. Bridges didn't like the structure and formality of classes though; she wanted to draw on her own terms.

"I just liked to draw the world around me," she said. "I didn't take it too seriously. I just liked to draw to see if it could be drawn."

She quit art classes and attended Northwestern University for business management and sales. Fresh out of college, she entered the "real world," helping manage the construction consulting firm that oversaw building the Sears Tower.

"I was there when they first put all those windows in and it was wintertime," Bridges said.

Planners kept guardrails far from the base of the building because the Windy City's winter gusts swirled through the unfinished tower. Periodically, windows popped out.

"You have to look at the Sears Tower as a series of blocks and structures," Bridges said. "You can't just look at it from one angle. And it is like sculpture. You should be able to walk around it and hopefully you get a chance to touch it to see if it's warm or hard or soft or smooth, feel the shapes, angles, planes."

Later she took a job as the only female sales rep at a Chicago men's clothing store.

"I remember the guy saying 'So can you tell me why you want this job and I said 'Well, the money looks really good,'" Bridges said.

When she was in her late 30s, a friend from The Art Institute of Chicago discovered some of Bridges' drawings at a cocktail party. As it turned out, she'd never stopped creating art, and in fact still had drawers, even closets, crammed full of work. Bridges reluctantly submitted a portfolio to the famous institute and was offered a scholarship.

The next seven years were a whirl of inspirations, she said - lectures from brilliant professors, trips to France, Spain and Italy. They were played out in conjunction with her life with new husband Barry Witt at their apartment in the city.

"I'm spoiled," Bridges said. "Not spoiled like a super wealthy person because I'm not; it's just being spoiled in experiences."

She earned a bachelor's in Fine Arts, then a master's in Fine Arts and yet another master's in Art History and Criticism. Eventually she left academia, but after a few dull positions at art studios in the city, she took a traveling job with the Art Institute as a lecturer and recruiter. In 1984, she moved with Witt to Bonita Springs.

On her travels, she found some unusual jewels like an old mansion with a botanical garden in the Philadelphia suburbs, which not even the locals knew contained one of the largest collections of Cezanne in the world. A retired surgeon named Albert Barns lived there and owned the collection, which included other famous impressionist works. They are still available to see but only by appointment.

Priceless paintings filled every inch of wall space, hung in the same cramped manner which people in 18th century Paris would have viewed them, at a "salon."

"It's just you in the room, and there they are," Bridges said. "Just everywhere. You had to walk up this narrow stairway and people could have reached out and touched the paintings. It was like walking into wonderland."

Essentially, Bridges was still a start-struck student. She had been playing that role for a long time.

"Like a lot of things, sometimes you need to move on," she said. "When you do the same thing for a long time sometimes the essence of it doesn't challenge you anymore."

Bridges came to the Art League in 1999 and still draws, paints and works with clay at a studio in her home. Recently, she has been fascinated with British artist Andy Goldsworthy who creates art which may be temporary because the pieces are installed in nature.

"They're there for this moment in time and then poof, they're gone," Bridges said.

A work of art that is there for a moment then gone - sounds just like a person.