The new paintings at Red Cup Coffeehouse in Boothbay Harbor are not Suzi Thayer’s “work.” Work is what she does at the Boothbay Register to pay the bills. But painting is more fun. It has long been a dream of hers to make painting her work, but she has never dared to make that leap.

She didn’t study art at Yale, the Art Institute of Chicago, or Rhode Island School of Design. She majored in art education at the University of Southern Maine and dropped out after three years, when she came to Boothbay Harbor and fell in love with a sailor, married him and sailed to the Caribbean that fall instead of finishing college. Her bad.

To her credit she was never without a sketchbook over the next few years as she sailed on a 100 year-old schooner out of the harbor and crewed on a 60-foot ketch from Boothbay Harbor to the Caribbean each fall.

During those winters, after coming back to Maine and living in various places, including a house she built with her husband on the shore in Stockton Springs (with a wood stove for heat, a small stream for water and an outhouse) she continued to sketch and paint, with oils and acrylics — anything and everything that interested her.

Thayer wishes she knew what has become of those sketchbooks full of drawings done while sitting on a deck on the open ocean, sailing around the harbor, and roaming the coast of Maine. There were several sketches of the late, great, notorious Fritz Rockwell. She sketched those while rowing around the harbor drinking beer with him.

Thayer has loved art for as long as she can remember. At the age of 10, her parents drove her from Sanford to Kennebunk for weekly classes at the Brick Store Museum. From there she went on to various weekly art lessons with one artist or another in the Sanford area, continuing through her high school years. Her greatest childhood mentor was Cal Wilson, a painter and brilliant woman who introduced her to oil painting when she was 16.

Over the years she has had the good fortune of rubbing elbows with some notable artists and has been greatly influenced by them. Of note are Nancy Widrig Wissemann and her husband, John Wissemann, close friends and neighbors who are painters in Cushing, Maine and Long Island, N.Y., and Bernard Langlais, a sculptor from Cushing, who was a close family friend. Lois Dodd, a highly respected painter from New York City, who summers down the road from the Thayer cottage in Cushing, has long been an inspiration.

The closest Thayer has come to big time fame was once, while in the Langlais’ cottage on the St. George River in Cushing, a little boy, dressed to the nines, came in to the room where the kids were hanging out. One of the kids asked him his name and he said, “My name is Vincent Isaac Katz.” Whoa. Alex Katz’ kid. Alex was in the kitchen drinking martinis with the grownups.

And when Andrew Wyeth’s wife Betsy was young, she stayed in what is now the Thayer cottage and babysat Thayer’s mother, Jean Thayer, who can’t draw a stick figure, but is an artist in her own right and the reason for most of the artsy friends.

During the early ‘70s Thayer did some pen & ink drawings that were printed as note cards, by Bob Wilson, brother of Cal, and a graphic and fine artist, who was another childhood influence. The cards were packaged up with envelopes and loaded into the back of an old Chevy station wagon, then sold to shops up the coast as far as Bar Harbor and as far south as Boston, where she sold the mother-lode to the Havard Co-op. Those were the days.

Sometime during the early 80s she switched from painting oils and acrylics on large canvases to smaller, more attainable watercolors. As any painter will tell you, it’s not an easy transition. There is a huge difference between applying thick paint to canvas and watery color to paper. But it was love at first stroke.

Because of her early training in oils, as some of her watercolors indicate, Thayer sometimes uses watercolor like oils or acrylics. Watercolor law dictates that the only white in a watercolor should be the paper shining through. She uses white watercolor (a no-no with purists) for highlights or to lighten an area. But she’s a rebel.

One watercolor rule she does abide by is the use of black paint, another taboo. The “black” seen in these paintings is a mixture of alizarin crimson and winsor green, which together produce a beautiful luminous “black.”

Though art has never been Thayer’s way of living, it has always been a major part of her life, and though she’s never been under the illusion that she’s a great painter, or even a serious one, she does take her painting seriously. She never feels as “at peace” as she does when painting, and wishes she could devote more time to it.

Thayer said that as nice as it is to sell a painting, positive feedback is almost as good. So stop in to the Red Cup Coffeehouse for a delectable pastry and a hot cappuccino and check out the paintings on the brick wall. If you like them, great. If you don’t, just sit down and enjoy your coffee.