A full-time resident of Santa Rosa Beach, Florida since 1999, Susan is a native of Louisville, Kentucky and a graduate of Rhodes College in Memphis. She has lived and traveled in many places in this country and internationally, which enriched her art through different teachers, traditions, and experiences.

She studied art at Virginia Intermont College, East Tennessee State University, and with inspiring workshop Instructors. She continues to attend a Master Class in California annually.
Susan is a professional artist, known for paintings with a contemporary edge and sophisticated color. Her work is in the tradition of the post-impressionists, with their interest in color and a semi-abstract landscape. Each work is inspired by experience or memory and seeks to condense and give visual form to the experience of place.

Acrylic paints on canvas are her primary medium. The paint is applied in many layers to create rich color and a surface enriched with subtle changes of textures, lines, and values. Details emerge and are submerged. Each work is a dance between abstraction and representation, complexity and simplicity, the two-dimensional surface and the three-dimensional subject.

Susan’s paintings are in galleries, homes, corporate, and university collections nationwide. She has exhibited and won awards in numerous regional and national shows. She is recognized as a significant regional artist, nationally as “one to watch,” and was the Beaches of South Walton Artist of the Year (2004). Her work has recently been featured in the books, Studio Visit (Volume 41, 2018) and The Best of Acrylic Painting (Acrylic Works 2019); in Southwest Art Magazine (Jurors Choice, January 2018 and February 2020).

In addition to creating art, Susan serves as an art coach, acts as an arts advocate in the community, and juries art shows. Her work is represented by Leigh Truett Consulting, St. Simons Island GA; 1514 Home/In Design Interiors, Pensacola; Pinckney Simons Gallery. Beaufort, SC; Anne Hunter Galleries, Seaside FL and SoHo NYC; and at her studio/gallery (by appointment).