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ARTIST STATEMENT

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I have always been drawn to water like it was calling me home. The ocean, rivers, the shimmer of light on any moving surface — and beyond that, the whole breathing, luminous natural world — these are the things that stop me in my tracks and open something wide inside me.

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Restless and a little wild, like water itself — watercolor is the perfect medium to express that life force. Pigments travel and bloom and find each other unpredictably, light glows up through the paper, and the best passages often arrive unbidden. There's a constant negotiation between control and letting go that I find both humbling and exhilarating.

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What I'm really chasing is harder to name — something beneath the visible surface of things, a luminous energy that animates the natural world. I want to catch that trembling edge where the seen world opens into something deeper, something that hums with life and mystery.

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If a painting gives a viewer one quiet moment of recognition — a feeling of being stopped, held, transported somewhere luminous — that's everything I'm hoping for.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

 

Suzanne grew up surrounded by professional artists, learning early to follow her passion without hesitation. Her formal studies in Pictorial Arts and Modern Dance at UCLA and UC Berkeley launched a creative practice as broad and deep as her curiosity.

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In the early 1970s, she opened Dancing Water Pottery in Vermont, hand-building everything from the kick wheel to the outdoor gas-fired kiln. She thrived on the elemental alchemy of clay transformed by fire, until the realities of hauling fragile work across New England pointed her toward a new direction.

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She pivoted to teaching Creative Dance Improvisation and Postural Alignment, weaving together her love of movement with a deepening interest in kinesiology, biomechanics, and deep tissue bodywork. That work grew into Movement Improvement, a practice spanning more than two decades in which she helped students and clients find greater ease and freedom in their bodies.

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In the mid-1980s, Suzanne returned to the visual arts, studying Fine Art Photography and Graphic Design before founding Hot Steel Design. Pushing the boundaries of photographic convention through extensive experimentation in and out of the darkroom, her work earned national and international recognition through awards, exhibitions, and features in major photography publications.

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After retiring, her lifelong fascination with watercolor finally took center stage. Of all the mediums she has worked in, watercolor is the most demanding and the most alive — unpredictable as tides, as resistant to mastery as fire, fundamentally alchemical. Like the kiln work of her early years, pigment and water join, separate, and transmute into something luminous and surprising — always beyond what was intended. Living one block from the coastal waters of Birch Bay, Washington, Suzanne surrenders daily to that mystery, finding in it the same elemental truth she has pursued across every chapter of her creative life.