Susan Brown, submitted artwork
Susan Brown
Painting
Santa Cruz, CA
California artist Susan Brown grew up with European parents who introduced her to art at an early age. Brown painted and drew from childhood, winning a state-wide award when she was twelve. After retiring in 2016 from technology/bio-tech, she devoted herself to her painting career. Highlights include invitation to the Florence Biennial 2025, Barnes Foundation Scholarship, 2024, American Women Artist Award, 2023, Artist Residency, Vallauris, France, 2022, and Important World Artists VI; (one of 10 artists sponsored to be in the 2024 volume VI), and featured through the Homiens Gallery, "Meet the Artists," April, 2025. Brown's painting, “Davenport Evening,” was juried into the San Diego Museum of Art’s Winter Exhibition, Nov. 2024—March 2025. Brown’s background as a watercolor artist provided her the experience in use of light, shadow and negative space, and how to maintain freshness in her painting. She continued her art passion and education by studying acrylic, oil, figure drawing, and portraiture, including at the Pacific Art League, College of San Mateo, UC SantaCruz, and through independent workshops. Her work has been shown in international and US galleries, juried exhibitions, and in private collections. She teaches throughout California, and at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. Many of her well known paintings give life to lesser known places; they illustrate the essence of California.
Works
Susan Brown, submitted artwork
I am a colorist who blends reality and imagination; not an exact realist. I bring the soul of California into my paintings. I’m known for my paintings of Santa Cruz County, but I don't paint coastal or beach scenes because I feel they are over represented. My work brings new life to subjects often thought of as mundane, such as "just a street." I choose to show places that are rarely, if ever, seen in paintings and to celebrate little known aspects of well known places. My “Locations” series offer a new excitement to places that are well known; inviting viewers to see them with new eyes. These paintings originate from life studies, art history, photography, and my own experiences discovering local landmarks and scenes. My "Locations" paintings evoke a sense of recognition, nostalgia, or deja vu, whether or not someone has actually been to these places. Instead of giving all the answers, my paintings engage the viewer to ask themselves questions, such as where a road may lead. My abstracts excite the mind with color and form. Within my paintings I explore the boundary between interior and exterior space. I seek to reveal the poetry that lies between the two using symbols of nature, emotion, identity and light, drawing palpable form from the unseen. Scale is crucial to my work in order to highlight the tension between reality and imagination, to engineer space, light and human emotion simultaneously.
