Different strokes: ‘Oil and Water’ displays friendship forged in art

For most of their careers, Susan Zellmann-Rohrer and Mary McWilliams couldn’t have been farther apart professionally.

Zellmann-Rohrer spent decades as a software engineer after working in Silicon Valley, thinking in wireframes, user interfaces, and systems. McWilliams built a career as an Islamic art curator and museum professional, studying centuries-old ceramics, textiles, and paintings.

Today, both women are in their early 70s, are retired, live in Acton, and are preparing for their first joint art exhibition.

Their show, “Oil and Water,” running July 23 through September 10 at the Harvey Wheeler Community Center, will feature Zellmann-Rohrer’s oil paintings alongside McWilliams’ watercolors. The title reflects their preferred mediums — and the contrasting paths that brought them together.

“We couldn’t have been really more different,” Zellmann-Rohrer says. “Yet there was this sort of bond between us, which was art.”

The two met about five years ago — shortly after both retired — in a class at The Umbrella Arts Center. Neither had seriously pursued painting before. As they continued taking classes, they became friends and started going on what they called “art dates.” They would visit museums together or sketch at places such as Drumlin Farm, encouraging one another through the inevitable frustrations of learning a craft.

“When one of us gets discouraged, the other would say, ‘Oh, but you must keep painting,’” McWilliams says.

Discrete approaches 

Even though they learned together, their approaches were different. Zellmann-Rohrer is drawn to atmosphere and mystery, while McWilliams focuses more on shape, texture, and the physical presence of her subjects.

For both women, retirement offered the opportunity to focus more on themselves.

McWilliams said she had wanted to paint for as long as she could remember, but never found the time while balancing work and family. She said starting something new after decades of professional success required humility.

“You’re used to walking into a room of people who are really interested in what you have to say,” she says. “Then suddenly you’re a beginner.”

She said the challenge became part of the reward.

For Zellmann-Rohrer, painting became a way to explore questions that had fascinated her throughout her engineering career. Rather than striving for photographic realism, she looks for unexpected light, shifting colors, and the unseen ideas behind a scene.

Painting, she says, is “so much emotion and so much learning and thinking and struggle.”

Neither woman views art as simply a retirement pastime.

“It is so not that,” Zellmann-Rohrer says. “It’s a journey. It’s a voyage.”

“It gave me a whole new way of looking at the world,” McWilliams says.

Both women said they hope their exhibition encourages others, retired or not, to pursue interests they may have put aside during their careers or while raising families.

“If I had one regret, I would say [it’s that] I didn’t start earlier. But it’s never too late,” McWilliams says. “Anyone who has that impulse, who has that kind of need, should act on it.”