Maryland artist Susan Webster was born in the District of Columbia, but because her father was employed with an international construction firm, she grew up on the move, living throughout the United States. She spent much of her life in the Pacific Northwest and Wyoming before finally beginning her university studies here on the East Coast.

Webster graduated from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in the summer of 1986 with a degree in printmaking. She left her position as adjunct instructor in painting, drawing, and graphic design at Cecil Community College in North East, Maryland, in 2002 to focus on her artwork full time. Her work has become well known in the Mid-Atlantic region, where her shows regularly sell out, and her newly inked publishing contract with Wild Apple Graphics will extend her recognition throughout the United States and abroad and introduce her to many new aficionados.

She has exhibited her work extensively in the Mid-Atlantic region, in both group and solo shows, and has had her work included in shows in the Southern United States, the Pacific Northwest, Great Britain, Rome, Italy, and as far away as Beijing, China. Her work is held extensively in private collections, and in corporate collections including the Allegheny University Hospital in Philadelphia, PA, and R. R. Donnelly and Sons. Former Pennsylvania Governor Richard Thornburgh also owns her work.

This current body of work finds Webster at the top of her powers as a painter. She employs collagraph printmaking, gesso, acrylic, and pastel, on both canvas and paper, to create a deceivingly simple statement on the beauty of the everyday image, the things we might pass by with little notice. Her style is vivid and mobile, an expressionist abstraction of the mundane with a strong fauvist bent: A table set with food and momentarily abandoned, cut tulips by a desk or bedside, a suburban neighborhood utterly devoid of postmodern irony.

Hoping the viewer will bring their own subjective slant to her work, Webster still makes sure what she wants seen is seen – In Saturday Night Social a telephone and laptop sit idle, accompanied by a half-full glass of wine and bowl of popcorn, leaving one to ponder what is playing on the old-style radio nearby and where the room’s occupant has gone, and with whom. In Better Things to Do that same half-full glass serves as backdrop to the almost folded laundry in a basket next to a stilled vacuum cleaner and the impulse to escape the mundane couldn’t be more clearly drawn. A book sprawls open on a blood red ottoman in Hiding Place, and a cigar curls smoke upward from an ashtray perched on the overstuffed arm of an empty chair in the light of a turquoise shaded reading lamp as a black cat creeps cautiously up a spiral stair toward a small, red ball, and one wonders just who or what is hiding, and where. To look closely at one of Susan Webster’s paintings is to stand perched at the threshold of a world both deeply personal and idiosyncratic, and yet one that beckons with cartoon intensity. The impulse to step into that world and finish the scene can be nearly intoxicating.

Susan Webster is fast becoming one of the more sought after artists in this region. Her shows regularly sell out in Philadelphia, as have her first five shows here at Canton Gallery. Another, major exhibit of Susan’s work opens here at Canton Gallery in the spring of 2006. It will be her sixth solo exhibit here, surely as with her past shows a huge success, and the continuation of a growing relationship with her Baltimore area collectors. Please contact us if you wish more information on Susan or her work.