Where Art Plays Its Part: Volume VIII: Mingled-Medium Painter Marilyn Shafer Bush

Marilyn Shafer Bush knew in the days of her childhood that a paintbrush would always be laced between her fingertips, throughout the stretches of her life.

Born and raised in Royersford, still living in that zip code today, Shafer Bush had parents who warmly encouraged her talent as soon as they realized how pursuing art led to a growing passion in her.

“I was always into something, creating things,” she said.

During the Christmas break of her seventh-grade year, she received a drawing kit as a gift, managing to complete it before school was back in session. From then on, her parents and teachers persuaded her well into drawing and painting.

“I did a lot of portraits in charcoal from the yearbook and would time myself,” Shafer Bush said. “I started doing landscapes my senior year. And I sketch, but my love is paint.”

Since she never attended art school, Shafer Bush revealed that she’s self-taught. Even so, her art is known around the Southeastern Pennsylvania region and has trailed onto homes up and down the East Coast and in a few places abroad.

For most of her life, she practiced in watercolor, taking lessons at age 18 from the late John Smith of Anvil Studio in Pottstown. One of her first watercolor paintings was of the train station in Pottstown, in fact.

But with arthritis in her knees making painting more difficult because of watercolor pieces needing such immediate and constant attention before drying quickly, she eventually transitioned into acrylics and began mingling techniques between the two different types of paint.

Her acrylics are from Australia, a special brand known to keep their moisture longer and dry out less easily compared to standard varieties found in the U.S.

“I paint all night. I don’t paint during the day,” she explained, noting that she starts at 10 or 11 p.m. and keeps busy at a canvas till sometimes 2 a.m. with a cup of tea and her puppies at her side. “Everything I do every day is influenced in my work.”

Being so affected by her surroundings and even the most subtle of stirs around her in daylight, Shafer Bush appreciates the quiet of nighttime when she is best at focusing, while others sleep.

“Everybody who knows me knows my moods by the colors I use,” she said.

Avidly gracious for the lure of countryside scenes, Shafer Bush is known to stop along picturesque sweeps of the roads on the way to Morgantown toward Shady Maple to find inspirations for her paintings, with her camera always grab-ready on the trips.

While she largely gravitates to painting the eye-views she absorbs out in the world, animals are special to Shafer Bush all in their own way.

“Animals say so much with their eyes,” she said, with horses, cats, birds, foxes and dogs as some of her subjects. “I paint a dog’s personality; I’ll spend hours and hours on the eyes, in transparent layers. I work until their eyes are looking back at me.”

People often commission her to do paintings of the pets they’ve lost, and several of the pieces have been requested from out of state.

A painting of a mountain gorilla she made for her daughter many years ago was picked up by the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, reprinted in limited edition and sold around the world.

Her pieces have been featured at the Chadds Ford Gallery and Havertown’s Tyme Gallery, but most recently, she’s took part in a one-woman show at the Phoenix Village Art Center in Phoenixville, exhibiting 64 paintings of landscapes from around the area, snowy scenes and animals.

Shafer Bush also teaches privately to students from and Owen J. Roberts, usually starting at age seven and sometimes continuing the classes till the child graduates from high school.

“I praise everything they do and never tell them what they’re doing is wrong,” Shafer Bush said about her students and their art, believing in their talent—hoping their artistic spirits never fade once they become adults.

“I just wish that everybody would take even two minutes out of their busy day to stop, retract and look around,” she said. “If everybody would look up or put their phone away for once and just look around at how beautiful our world is, then maybe they’d understand how an artist feels, or they might paint, draw, or photograph for themselves.”