Cottonwoods in New Mexico

30 x 40 cm
$395.00
unframed

Medium

pastel

Biography

Susan Czermak was born just after WW2 on a small island off the coast of Scotland where her father worked as a marine biologist. There she had, what she thinks now, seemed to be an extraordinary sort of childhood, where she wandered all over the island and along the seashore by herself even as young as 4 years old, surrounded by many sorts of birds and a small wilderness, as well as living in the village. Nothing untoward ever happened to her. From childhood she had an interest in design and artistic representation but those interests remained largely undeveloped until much later.

For most of her life she has lived in the southern hemisphere in New Zealand and Australia, and has worked variously as a computer programmer, as a farmer, and as a teacher. For the last twelve years she has been exploring watercolour and since 2001 has had regular solo exhibitions of her work mainly in France (where she lives in a village in SW France for about half the year) but also from time to time in Australia, where she lives in the Yarra Valley.

The best description of her style is realist, and she is a member of the Australian Guild of Realist Artists. She hopes that sometimes her work may appear somewhat impressionist and is most interested in light and its effect on a subject. Trying to capture the light and as a result the mood of a scene seems to her more important than the details or the scene. She has exhibited regularly in SW France since 2001 with at least one solo exhibition every summer.

Her affordable art is in private and official collections in France, Holland, Switzerland, UK, USA, New Zealand, Italy, Australia and Belgium. For each watercolour painting she uses a limited palette of artist quality watercolour to achieve a harmony and all work is completed on hand made 100% cotton watercolour paper. She occasionally experiments with pastels.