Local Artist Penny Sisto
Listening to Penny Sisto’s Northern Scottish accent is enough to feel at peace, but combine that with her talk of art, meditation, and stories of her life, and you will feel like you’re listening to the most beautiful book read aloud by an old friend.
Sisto’s life is as wondrous as her voice — from growing up in poverty in the Orkney Islands of Scotland, assisting her grandmother as a midwife at the age of 16, and having an artist see her potential as a child — her life is a tapestry of so many lives lived in one. And that is shown in her pieces — a depth of life and beauty.
Spending much of her childhood with her grandmother, her family could not afford drawing books, so she was told to find a smooth spot in the sand outside their home and draw to her heart’s content.
“A man came along one day, and he came up, and he was an artist, and he said, ‘Who does the drawing on the sand?’ And I said, ‘It’s me.’ And he said, ‘Can you draw with a pen?’ and he handed me a pen and drawing pad, and I drew something,” Sisto said. “He said, ‘You must study art. You’re a true artist.’”
“A man came along one day, and he came up, and he was an artist, and he said, ‘Who does the drawing on the sand?’ And I said, ‘It’s me.’ And he said, ‘Can you draw with a pen?’ and he handed me a pen and drawing pad, and I drew something,” Sisto said. “He said, ‘You must study art. You’re a true artist.’”
She was 6 years old at the time.
The art she creates now is quilted but a mix of mediums. She created her first one at the age of 10.
“We have ‘tinkers’ on the Orkney [islands off the coast of Scotland], what you call in America ‘gypsies,’ who come by every summer. And they had earrings like a woman would have or bright clothing. And when they left, I said to Granny, ‘Can I use the bit bag and make a quilty?’” she said. “That was the first piece I actively did for just myself.”
Her grandmother kept that quilt for many years inside her home.
“I did not know she kept it until I went to lay her out for her funeral,” Sisto said. “She spanked my hands for wasting fabric, but she kept it.”
What inspires Sisto’s art varies depending on when she creates.
“Whatever is happening the day I’m making a piece inspires me. I occasionally dream, but it’s very hard for me to remember dreams.”
“Whatever is happening the day I’m making a piece inspires me,” she said. “I occasionally dream, but it’s very hard for me to remember dreams.”
Her ideas hit her as fully formed images, which she then works to translate with her hands.
“The hardest work is putting down the work you see in your mind,” she said. “The quilts in my mind are so much better than what comes out in my hands.”
The part she loves most is putting it in the machine and starting to quilt. “I know then that I’ve put down all I can put down on that piece, and the rest is what I call ‘titivating it’ or getting it ready for show.”
For any of her pieces, she said she knows when they’re finished based on when she thinks they look horrible. “I love it at the beginning — in the end I divorce it,” she said, laughing.
She also works as fast as her ideas come to her, creating 39 quilts for a show at Mount Saint Francis in September in just four months.
Sisto has worked tirelessly creating art throughout the course of her life all while moving around the globe and raising children. Between her husband and herself, they have nine children and 34 grandchildren.
Sisto has worked tirelessly creating art throughout the course of her life all while moving around the globe and raising children. Between her husband and herself, they have nine children and 34 grandchildren.
“There were times when I mothered badly because I was creating. For some reason, they’re very fond of me,” she said, smiling.
Sisto is all about life, and her goal is just to keep going. After being told when she was young that she may not live long due to repeated rheumatic fever, she considers any year going forward a pleasant
Story by Darian Decker
Photos by Michelle Hockman
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