Susan was born and raised on Vancouver Island, and has enjoyed drawing and painting since childhood. She studied History in Art at the University of Victoria, and has taken various workshops and courses with a number of artists over the years.

Over the past decades, her work has been exhibited and sold in both the Sooke Fine Art Shows and the Sidney Fine Art Shows.

Susan loves to paint and is always gratified if her pictures bring a smile. Her subjects include life portraits, still life, plein air, and figurative scenes.

Although I was born in Belgium, Montreal was my hometown from a very early age. School days were humdrum but art, wherever I found it, was always fascinating. Whenever I could, I developed my interest in art by spending time at various art galleries and museums in both downtown Montreal and Toronto. My early inspirations were the French Masters and subsequently the Canadian Group of Seven. At school, Art Class was my favorite and easiest class. Painting came naturally to me and my teachers often encouraged me to pursue it seriously.

However, as our family was not well off, I embarked on a business career to earn a living. Any free time from work was often allocated to my art. For the most part I was self-taught until I could afford to take various art course offered by colleges in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.

Now that I am retired and living in Victoria, I have much more time to pursue my passion. I continue to attend painting and drawing workshops for both landscape and portraiture. I particularly enjoy the challenges of plein air painting every summer. The incredible and varied landscape in and around Victoria and Vancouver Island provides me with immense and continuing inspiration.

I was born in Switzerland where I studied architectural design. I later persued studies in graphic design and worked as a commercial artist. Since completing a Visual Arts degree at UVic I have worked and experimented with a variety of mediums.

The Artist’s Work

I practice sketching, drawing, and painting landscapes, still life, and portraiture in particular. These I execute spontaneously from life, mainly in pastels, in rapid renderings to instill a sense of immediacy, to capture the feelings and mood of the particular person and particular moment.

The Artist’s Work