Between a rock and a hard place, Readfield woman gets creative

By Bill Van Tassel

READFIELD — Jill Sansouci experienced a double whammy when the COVID-19 pandemic hit two years ago, caught between a rock and a hard place — pandemic and retirement.
She had recently retired from her job at Hannaford. Before that job, she worked at the Maine Veterans Home in Augusta as a cook and activity manager for 16 years. Her degree in culinary arts from what is now Southern Maine Community College served her well there, and also at her previous job as a cook at Livermore High School.
Blessed with a creative nature and an interest in flower gardens and garden landscaping, Sansouci always kept busy. While at Maine Veterans’ Homes, she planned and completed a memory garden for Alzheimer’s patients, for which she received a commemorative plaque. Consoling Alzheimer’s patients gave her immense pleasure, she said. When one of the residents died, she would always ask the family what kind of flower they would like to plant in the loved one’s honor.
When she was stuck in her house because of COVID-19 and retirement two years ago, she had to decide how she was going to spend her time.
Right before the pandemic, her husband, Ron, had encouraged her to retire. “You don’t need to work anymore,” he told her. ”You’ve done so many jobs your whole life.”
Other Mainers faced the same question: “What am I going to do with all this time?”
Sansouci, filled with creative urges and forever programmed to be busy, looked out her window one day at the rock wall bordering the property that she and her husband had owned for three years and had an idea.
“Feeling trapped in my home, I decided to paint some of those flat rocks,” she said. She had no formal training in painting, though her mother, also a creative person, had liked to paint. A couple of her mother’s paintings even hang in the Sansouci home.
From that idea, two years later, Sansouci has completed many dozens of rock surface paintings with a wide variety of subject matter. Her colorful acrylics have brought to life birds and other small animals, Gnomes, flowers, bees, frogs, mountains, and other natural scenes. She spends from one to three hours on each painting.
She has done so many, one of her neighbors jokingly told her, “If I see my own rock wall starting to shrink, I’ll know you have been around.”
Though most of the pandemic restrictions have ended, Sansouci is still busy looking over the rocks on her property and planning her next painting. In the meantime, she has also put her acrylics on the outside walls of her shed, painted a couple of larger boulders and produced a few canvas paintings of her favorite subjects.

TOP PHOTO: A rock wall on Jill Sansouci’s property in Readfield provided all the rocks that she needed to fill her time and fulfill her creative urge when stuck at home after retiring, right when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. MIDDLE: Birds are one of Jill Sansouci’s favorite animal subjects for her rock paintings. BELOW: A small collection of some of the rocks painted by Jjll Sansouci during her first two years after retirement. BOTTOM:
Jill’s big rock – One of the extra large painted rocks on Ron and Jill Sansouci’s property in Readfield. (Bill Van Tassel photos)