Susanne is from Leelanau County, MI. As a young child she lived at the Dechow farm in the Port Oneida farm district, where the beauty of the landscape was often at odds with its harshness. She uses line and color to convey feelings of love, danger, volatility, loneliness, anger, sorrow, and elation.
In her work Susanne explores the following: what is important, what is necessary, what is unnecessary, what is unnecessary yet must be included, where is the balance, where is the out of balance. The tension in her work is created by painting the answers to these types of questions. She sees these questions as metaphors for life’s biggest and most insistent conundrums. What do we remove? What do we keep? And why?
Her painting process includes watching for forms to appear while paying equal attention to the silent spaces. Darkness gives life to light, and lightness gives life to darkness. An abstract painter at heart, she is intrigued by messages that are conveyed without words—by energy, by intention and, most magically, by pigment and linseed oil.
Susanne currently lives in Carrboro, North Carolina and paints in her outdoor studio.