THE ARTS
Susan was raised in a family where the arts, music, dance, and visual arts were part of life. She cannot imagine life without these elements and shares this perspective wherever she is working with parents and teachers.
DANCE
She started ballet age 5, studied modern dance with two students of Martha Graham, the American dancer who revolutionized dance in the US, and her last dance studies were of belly dancing in Washington DC during her Montessori elementary training in 1976-1977. She has fond memories of her mother demonstrating a “foot dance” that she invented on the spot with great humor and joy, showing Susan and her siblings how each part of the body can have its own potential for creative movement.
MUSIC
Susan began piano studies with her mother and grandmother shortly after dance. But after intense piano competitions for gold or silver medals during high school she stopped studying piano, having never enjoyed the negative elements of competition. In the 1980’s she visited the Suzuki Music institute in Matsumoto, studied Suzuki piano, and was her son’s first Suzuki piano teacher. Then she studied Suzuki viola where she discovered how difficult string playing is, and how different from piano. Today she plays piano at home and sometimes during Montessori international work. In the fall of 2022, preparing to speak at a university in Lima, Peru (El Instituto Pedagógico Nacional de Monterrico) the audience becoming restless because the computer being set up for the PowerPoint was taking time. There was a grand piano on the stage so Susan played her favorite Chopin Prelude much to the delight of all. Today she is recording some piano music for children and grandchildren, because non of the performances of her mother and grandmother were ever recorded. To see some of these imperfect, non-competitive music videos: CLICK: music
PAINTING
Visual Art? Here is information from her art site:
BRIEF ART BIO: Susan has been painting since the 1960s. She has won best of show in the Redwood Art Association and Westhaven Center for the Art and her last solo show was held in Dublin, Ireland. Her paintings have been hand-cried back to such places as Australia, Italy, Bhutan, the Netherlands, Morocco, Peru, Colombia, Japan and other countries. Each painting can take several months to several years to create as each work is unique in subject and often an exploration of constantly changing style, often inspired by dreams or by her education work in more than thirty countries. Susan was a founding member of the Trinidad Art Gallery, now offering her work through art galleries or the internet, preferring to spend “art” time actually working in her studio.
FORMAL ART STUDIES: Denison University, Indiana University, San Francisco State University, private classes, 10 years studying with Michael Hayes, Eureka, California.
MUSEUM STUDIES: Museums where Susan has learned from great art include The Musee du Louvre, Paris, France: Vatican Museums, Rome, Italy; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musee d’Orsay, Paris; Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy; Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Modern, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; The National Gallery, London; The British Museum, London; National Palace Museum, Taipei; State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; The National Art Center, Tokyo; National Museum of Scotland; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Pergamon Museum, Berlin, Germany; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, Havana, Cuba; Museo National de Arte, Mexico City; National Museum of Bhutan; The Kubota Itchiku Art Museum, Yamanashi, Japan; the Hakone Open Air museum, Japan, the National Library of Mongolia in Ulaanbaatar, and many others. She attributes her skill in composition, color, subject, and other elements of oil painting to these studies and years of work.
The link to this site, with some of her paintings archived: CLICK: paintings
Prints and cards of her work are being produced in several countries, for information: CLICK: prints