We met at artist Stephanie Danforth’s house in Chilmark, where the sun pours through her dining room windows just the way it should in an art studio. She does have a separate studio, but she prefers to paint in the dining room where dozens and dozens of paintbrushes sit on top of a sideboard and paintings of all shapes and sizes line the walls, some of their frames resting on the hardwood floors. I find out as we talk that it doesn’t matter where she paints, as long as she paints.
“I can’t go too long without painting,” she tells me. “I listen to books on tape while I paint. I just disappear. I get into it and then the day is over. I just love it, love it, love it.”
Before I reached out to Stephanie about her artwork, I googled her because that’s usually my first step when I talk to an artist. I had to see her work — and she creates amazing art — but the bigger picture though, is that sales from her work support the Leo Project, her daughter Jess’ nonprofit based in Nanyuki, Kenya. Jess founded the Leo Project in 2020 in memory of her best friend, Caitlin O’Hara, a Leo on the astrology wheel who died at age 33 after a lung transplant and after suffering from cystic fibrosis for years. At Caitlin’s funeral, Jess made a promise to do something incredible with her own life, even though she herself was battling breast cancer at the time. Stephanie’s younger daughter, Carly, is hoping to make a transition to living and working in New York City soon, and she helps with marketing materials for the Leo Project. Jess’ work with the Leo Project has grown over the years, and last year they opened the Caitlin O’Hara Community Health Clinic. Their educational programming includes digital literacy, sexual and reproductive health, life skills, climate and health, mental wellness, and creative arts. At the Leo Project’s Resource Center, they also work with adults providing education they need to lead healthy and empowered lives. They offer community outreach clinics and screenings, as well as treatment services to the more vulnerable population groups within their county. It didn’t take long before I could imagine Stephanie as the artistic matriarch of this small group of strong women.
Danforth, who will be 70 this fall, was a pediatric nurse and then a pediatric nurse practicitioner before diving full-time into painting. Self-taught, she decided to take a year off work to explore the painting she had enjoyed since taking a college art class.
“I thought, who do I want to grow old with? Pediatricians or artists?” Danforth says.
There are found art objects covering the table tops, paintings of every kind cover the walls of her home, and Danforth has portable art experiences every time she travels, which is often.
“Even when I travel I take these journals with me,” she explains while showing me her collection of travel journals filled with sketches and painted pieces. She throws a set of watercolors in her backpack and takes off for destinations all over the world — Morocco, Kenya, an artists’ residency in France. She’s a firm believer that we’re all creative, we just don’t always allow ourselves room to create. In one of her Kenya travel journals, there are detailed paintings of a black Converse high top sneaker. In another she has a sketch of a COVID test, an unfortunate part of a trip to Morocco. “I love turning people on to art … we are all artists, but it gets shut down so early.”
Stephanie first traveled to Kenya herself for a safari some years ago, and she was taken with the experience. She saw a two-room schoolhouse built by the efforts of a professor who had tried to make a difference. Stephanie saw how the Samburu people lived in Northern Kenya with nothing and wanted to help, but that world was far away from the art world she lives in. She’s managed somehow to have the best of both worlds hold prominent places in her life. Her first-ever portrait was of a baby in Kenya, and it still holds a place of honor at her house. She couldn’t part with it.
“My first portrait is of a little baby,” Stephanie explained. As she was preparing to paint, she lifted up a prayer of sorts, saying “Can you use me as a vessel and help me with this?”
“I don’t know how I got there, but I’ll never let her go, she’s mine,” Stephanie says, as she shows me the small-but-powerful oil painting. “I believe it wasn’t just me painting.” She still loves painting portraits, even if they are exacting in nature.
A lot of her work is the beautiful and delicate subject of flowers, some painted on gold leaf. Stephanie says flowers are very much about the divine, and she says her artist statement explains that she wants to provide a rest for your eyes, almost like a mandala — something peaceful. Danforth says nothing compares to oil painting, which, she says, “spreads like butter.”
Along with travel and painting, Stephanie is a strong proponent of lifelong learning. She wants to try sculpture soon.“I’ll always take classes until I pass from this earth,” she told me. Her first art class was in college.
Stephanie says that she can’t believe how relaxing it is to draw. “If you put something in front of you and start drawing every single day, you will get better,” she says. “If you say you can’t do it, you won’t. I have no training at all.” We’re our own worst critic, she says. “If you try it, you can do it and you’ll have joy from it, but it takes a while. My first painting was horrible but I just kept doing it.”
One of the reasons she enjoys traveling so much, Stephanie explained, is that art is more accessible in some other countries.
“I love anyone in art in any realm,” she says. “I was in Florence last fall and there were artists everywhere. I met painters who invited me into their studios. They were so welcoming and so present. We don’t have that in the U.S. I bought a leather bag there and I saw where she made it.”
She used to exhibit at Island galleries but is just now opening up that extra studio space on her property as a small gallery where guests are welcome to come and browse. Using her talent to support the Leo Project is the most important piece, Danforth says.
“That’s my main thing … and I just love art. I feel so blessed just to be an artist. Could there be a better profession to grow old with?”
To find out more about the Leo Project, visit theleoproject.org. To see more of Stephanie Danforth’s work, visit stephaniedanforth.com. To see her work at the studio, email her at danforth.stephanie@gmail.com.