Susan Cohen Thompson pushes past her long established style of painting primarily in watercolor, to discover her newest work in oil painting and ceramics. The core vision of her work remains consistent.
Nature has always provided the inspiration for Thompson. She has hiked into temperate forests of the Pacific Northwest and deep into the rainforest of the Ecuadorian Amazon. She has gone bird watching in the jungle of Guatemala as well as watching birds from her studio. The studio overlooks a forest, the Olympic Mountains and The Saratoga Passage along the Salish Sea, the environment that plays a key role in her work.
Before moving to the Northwest United States, Susan lived in Massachusetts, just west of Boston. She exhibited her paintings in galleries and nature sanctuaries throughout the area. Alongside of her art, she began a window display business in the 1980’s, decorating windows in Boston and Cambridge. In the mid 80’s she expanded her design business to corporate space planning. All along, she continued painting and showing her work, usually in solo exhibitions. She was the founding curatorial director for The Center for Arts in Natick and was instrumental in creating venues where hundreds of artists have shown their work.
Fully focused on her art since 1993, her images appear on a number of book covers, and occasionally in calendars. In the Northwest, her paintings have been in numerous exhibitions from Olympia to Bellingham, WA.
To see a complete list of exhibitions of Susan’s work go to this page.
Susan received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (in sculpture) from Akron University in 1974 and has continued her education at several museum schools. She is mostly a self taught painter and developed a unique style that is evident in all of her work. She is from New York and her education started at a very early age by visiting the museums found there.