Featured Artist Susan von Borstel
Animals are wonderful and enrich our life and self awareness. Their behavior is a window into our own behavior. What does bliss look like? What is play? What is contentment? Animals help us understand ourselves.
The beauty, shapes, and colors of animals provide me with endless visual puzzles to solve. How can I show an animal’s tentativeness so you can feel it too. How can I make excitement look exciting? What shapes let us see and feel animals playing?
To solve these puzzles I paint in oil on both natural stone and canvas. The stones are archivally treated and provide colors, textures and patterns that I build upon. I’m always searching for the “perfect” stone, one with a strong suggestion, good composition and exciting possibilities.
Canvas and panels have none of the restriction of the stone and allow me to imagine a finished image and then figure out the best steps involved in realizing it.
Just a few of the paintings by Susan von Borstel at the Gallery for First Friday
Susan is an internationally known artist of horses, wildlife and people. Crazy about horses and wild about art she started painting and drawing horses at a young age and went on to receive a BS degree from the University of Colorado in Zoology and Art.
She paints in oils on canvas and archivally prepared natural stone that inspire her with their patterns and textures. When she finds a special stone she creates a painting suggested by the stone that teases the viewer into supplying the details.
Taking suggestions from years of painting on stone, Susan also works in oil on canvas and follows where her imagination takes her. These paintings are layered, complex, often suggesting deeper meanings. Her lifelong involvement with nature guides her hand.
Susan’s work has been featured in many magazines as well as on their covers. She paints full-time at her Davis studio and welcomes visitors
Susan won the Peoples’s Choice Award at the 2012 Cattlemen’s Western Art Show and at the 2013 San Dimas Festival of the Arts..