Susan is a watercolor artist living in Friendswood, TX. She has a PhD and for many years studied plants and how they interact with their environment. She brings this knowledge to artistic studies of plants and landscapes.

As a scientist she would study how water flows through the soil to plant roots, and then through the plant. Water flows through the porous media that is soil influenced by pore size, chemical properties, and gravity. Watercolor painting is an investigation of the physics of flow through the porous media that is paper. It harnesses the interaction of capillary and gravity forces, pigment, water, and paper into controlled or chaotic color flows, granulations, and glazes.

Her favorite color is sunlight streaming through leaves. The Japanese call it Komorebi, or the scattered sunlight filtering through a tree canopy. The English words for it are sunbeams, crepuscular rays, dappled light, or shafts of light. Instead of researching light and photosynthesis in leaves she now captures how light is transmitted through or reflected from water, stone, soil, bark, leaves, or petals with paint and paper.

Her inspiration for painting comes from the natural world: at Keukenhof Flower Garden near Amsterdam, looking out the car window on the road from Santa Fe to Los Alamos, leaf litter on the forest floor, and even from a shrub that catches her eye in a hotel parking lot. It is looking at the complexity of a scene and capturing from it the essence of form, pattern, light, and color that exists in the natural world.