ABOUT THE ARTIST

Hello! I'm Susannah, and you might know me from the Lover's Eyes and portraits that you will find on my eponymous website here. Although they seem very different, these bold and colorful geometric paintings and those romantic realism paintings both come directly from my obsessions with art and story.

While I love contemporary abstract art, in many ways I find it superficial and sometimes alienating. These color palettes nod to the color pairings of Rothko and the precision of Hilda af Klint, for instance, but at the same time they unpretentiously date back to well before the great names, to early tradesmen's samples and paint powder charts. The paintings are bold, straightforward, honest, harmonious, and somehow serene. They are easy to look at and visually unmysterious, but upon closer inspection the scribbled pencil labels beneath the colors hint at deeper meanings, intricate connections, and untold stories.

My degrees include a Ph.D. in French literature from Yale University, where I studied with Harold Bloom and Peter Brooks, an M.Phil. from Paris IV, an M.A. from Lyon II, an M.A. in comparative literature from S.F.S.U., and graduate studies in the philosophy of language. I’m the author-editor of Living with Shakespeare (Penguin) and Why We Read Jane Austen (Random House).

My paintings have been acquired for private collections, exhibited at Bergdorf Goodman and the Liz Lidgett Gallery, made available as prints through Artfully Walls and Anthropologie, and featured in the forums "Colossal", "My Modern Met", and "Antiques & the Arts Weekly", the magazines Tatler and Where Women Create, and the canonical reference books Lover's Eyes: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection and Phaidon's The Jewelry Book. View my c.v. here.

I’ve lived in Paris, Lyon, London, New Haven, San Francisco, and West Hollywood, and my art assistant-mini-shih-tzu Agatha and I currently live with my husband, his two dogs, and now my mother's little spaniel in hills of the Napa Valley, California. Read more about our studio-home in this article in Where Women Create.