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Susan Colwell | bio [+]

Susan Colwell was born in North Carolina, the eldest of three girls, and moved to Ohio at an early age. Always drawing, Susan was enrolled in classes at the Toledo Museum of Art at the age of six. She had her first solo exhibition at a Toledo art gallery as a teenager.

While in high school, her family moved to Switzerland. Nearly every weekend, the family traveled throughout Europe and there her love of art was cemented. Susan earned her BFA in painting from Miami University in Ohio. She has worked as an artist in an advertising agency and co-founded Gallery 12. She has lived in Indiana and Rochester, NY, working as a social worker and always painting, and now resides in Charleston. The smell of pfluff mud is in her blood, so it seems only natural for Susan to seek refuge in the south.

“I am moved by the ever-changing light and atmosphere in the Lowcountry and I strive to recreate the feeling or mood of a place or moment. The subtleties of light, reflections on the water, and the softness I see and feel in the landscape greatly influence me. The subject is never foremost in my mind…it is always about the feeling. Many times a painting begins with a rich color and it simply evolves on its own and I seem to be just a part of the process, a process that is ongoing and never complete.”

Large, loose impetuous strokes and juicy color typify Susan’s abstract-impressionist oil paintings. “I try to recapture my feelings about a place by using color and form, producing a presence of space, mood, and light.”

Neon Glow oil on canvas landscape Susal Colwell Charleston, SC