Former SLO wild child Sully Freed returns home with an art show at Linnaea’s

Sully Freed is a total animal. 

Full disclosure: I’ve known her and her family for decades, and she’s always scared me a little. She’s … unique.

She spent some of her formative years in SLO, but these days, she lives in Portugal. However, she’s returning to SLO this month to visit her parents, who still live here, and to show her recent paintings at Linnaea’s Cafe.

She landed in SLO the long way around.

“Mamma was a bit of a rolling stone—she tried out most every town between San Diego and SLO, and even once we were in SLO, we lived in every corner of town,” she told me via email. “I think I went to every elementary school except C.L. Smith. It partly explains this continual need for movement.”

Sully’s been on the move her whole life, dropping out of SLO High at 16 during her senior year.

“I wanted to surf the gnarly waves of the North Shore like Rick Kane,” she said, referring to the main character of the 1987 action surf drama North Shore, “so I went off to Hawaii. It was just a series of fits and starts from there until I finally got my shit slightly—very slightly—together, came back home, and did the Cuesta to Cal Poly path.”

She earned a biochemistry degree at Poly, and after graduation, “I took my shiny degree and went off trying to get to Lebanon, only made it as far as Paris … for a year. Then medical school in Mexico, which I loved, but couldn’t tolerate the smell of hospitals and quit after a year and a half.”

Would a military career settle this bouncing ball? 

“I somehow got shanghaied and woke up in Cape May, New Jersey, at Coast Guard bootcamp in 2000,” she explained. “I came out of there skinny and loud and disoriented, sitting in my parents’ house doing push-ups as if it would help me make sense of the turn my life had taken.”

‘It just changed everything. One weird semi-random birthday decision changed my life.’
—Sullivan ‘Sully’ Freed, artist

See how she always ends up back in SLO Town?

“My first deployment was to the Persian Gulf. Yes, I think most people have very little idea of how far the Coast Guard stretches. I started as a navigator and got bored and moved to the engine room as a diesel mechanic. Mechanics and medicine are oddly similar. Then moved up the ranks, then got in lots of drunken fights and moved down the ranks, made the fateful leap over to the officer corps, and that’s when I met New Orleans and fell head over heels … we’re still kind of together,” she joked. “It’s a complicated relationship. She’s a serious drama queen with all that weather, corruption, murders, and the goddamned stinging caterpillars that fall from the oak trees.

“But I eventually left to take an international posting in port security,” she continued. “Seven years of that, fly to Africa, work an insane week, fly back, unpack, buy groceries, pack, throw away groceries, fly to the Middle East, work an insane week—meeting, meeting, meeting, walk around ungodly hot port, lunch meetings, dinner meetings, interviews, meetings with very important people who don’t understand why the U.S. would send a woman for such an important job, after-work meetings wrapped up as cultural events, all day drives on pothole-filled roads, terrorist attacks, Ebola, angry mobs. … What the actual fuck does any of this have to do with art? Everything. Fucking everything!”

I must admit, I never thought of Sully as creative, so I was surprised when her paintings started popping up on social media a few years ago.

“I was super creative,” she countered, “but it was just squeezed out of me, first—though possibly unintentionally—by family, second and very intentionally by the military. I was always a maker. I bought my first house in my second year of service with that glorious zero-down VA loan and tore it to the studs. I did the same thing every time I was transferred—it was a weird and well-paying substitution for art.

“Then I got to New Orleans and got to let out some of that weird creative energy only to have to stuff it back in to finish out my 20 years,” she continued. “And it’s not like I retired and immediately everything was fine and I just sat at an easel and go! I was fucked in the head, completely beaten down, not just broken but more like shattered. Even now when I hear guys talking about the camaraderie or brotherhood of the military, I want to punch them in the dick. But you know, we do the work, lots of it, and the extra credit month in the desert on ayahuasca and … Jesus, this is a really rambling prelude to how this all started.

“It was my 50th birthday, I had retired and moved to Portugal and had no friends and decided to go on a retreat for said birthday. There was a very specific calculation here—the retreat didn’t matter, but my birthday was Monday or Tuesday, so I didn’t want to start the retreat on Sunday and celebrate the big 5-0 with strangers, so I found one that started on a Wednesday and boom—there I was with 12 fabulous Glaswegians. Well, 11. One was a right twat … fucking Rodger. And it was oil painting with Sandy Grant. 

“And it just changed everything,” she marveled. “One weird semi-random birthday decision changed my life. I had piddled around with internet courses during the pandemic, but this was proper painting: stinky solvents, plein air, buttery oils, French cheese, Scottish stories. I loved that group so much I moved to Glasgow a few months later. And there I was introduced to life drawing, which is just so hard to begin with, you know? It’s all hairy lines and tiny heads and chicken foot hands, and you’ve always got to be sitting next to some budding Egon Schiele so as to have the maximal degradation when peeking at your neighbors. I fucking loved it.”

She embraced painting and drawing in earnest, treating it like “a full-time job and a weekend hustle.” She went to museums, all the classes she could find. She painted over thrift store canvases with “crusty old paint tubes bought on eBay.”

The paintings she’s showing at Linnaea’s came from a detour she took last year to Mexico on her way to SLO and a “life painting” class—like life drawing but with paints.

“I feel something really different painting from a living, breathing, trying-so-hard-to-be-still human,” she said. “I feel so much love and gratitude.”

She dives into fauvism, the first radical art movement of the 20th century. It emerged from France in 1905, and the term “les fauves” translated as wild beasts. Henri Matisse and André Derain were the movement’s leaders. Sully Freed is carrying that colorful and wild tradition forward. ∆

Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.

This article appears in Nov 5-12, 2026.