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VC Star 2022 article
From 1/5/17 Ventura County Star Article:
A lifelong hiker and backpacker, Susan K. Guy thinks nothing of trekking great distances to find the right spot to paint.
For a painting in Mammoth, she got in a gondola in her ski gear and painted from the top of the mountain. At Rocky Mountain National Park, she got up at 4 a.m., battled gale-force winds and propped her easel against the open car door to paint.
But once she chooses a spot, she doesn’t try to replicate what she sees. Instead, her paintings are about the feelings and emotions inspired by the scene, and the end results are abstract, expressionistic oil paintings that resonate with the natural world.
Guy, growing up in New Zealand, was inspired by her parents and grandparents in both art and nature. Her parents were both physicians who backpacked whenever they could.
“I basically started backpacking in the womb,” she said.
At the age of 5, she told people she was going to be an artist, but she ended up going into medicine as a surer way of making a living. While doing a fellowship at UCLA, she moonlighted at the Ventura County Medical Center and camped in Ojai.
“When I moved to Ojai, I would go backpacking and hiking in Los Padres,” she said. “It was really the hills and mountains around here that inspired me to start painting again.”
She also paints when she travels, most recently capturing the Northern Lights in Alaska and Canada.
“For me, experiencing the world is not just what you see,” she said. “There is energy, movement, light changing, wind changing, the emotional experience of being there. When I paint something, I want to convey the experience, and I want to experience it through the painting, too.”
Link to full Ventura County Star 1/5/17 article
From the Ojai Quarterly Magazine, Summer Issue 2015:
Ventura County Star article from 10/8/15
Susan K. Guy said she participates in the Ojai Studio Artists Tour because it helps the community. Money raised from the tour goes to scholarships and to support various artist workshops and special art-related events during the year.
“This is the main activity for the Ojai Studio Artists,” said Guy, who uses water-soluble oil paints to create colorful, expressionistic landscapes. “This is a fundraiser for scholarships for art-related studies. Plus it gets artists out in the community to go around Ojai, talk to each other and cross-pollinate. With 50 artists there’s an exciting, huge variety.”
Guy, who added the “K.” to her name so as not to be confused with another artist of the same name who paints horses, said she thinks the Ojai Valley fosters creativity.
“I’ve always been attracted and inspired by the outdoors,” said Guy, who is also a psychiatrist and a search and rescue volunteer. “This is a very special valley — a physical place with a spiritual impact that inspires people to be creative, however that may be for them. There are actors, writers, musicians, visual artists — the community has always attracted people interested in expressing themselves, inspired by the nature here and the beautiful mountains.”
The tour includes a preview program at 7 p.m. Friday, which will review the work of each tour artist so people can map out their tour schedules.
Tour tickets are $30 in advance, $35 the day of event, $20 per person for groups of 10 or more and $15 for students. The event is free for those 17 and younger. Tickets are for studio visits all three days and admission to Saturday’s dessert reception, which features live music and the tour artists.
Tickets and tour brochures are available at http://www.ojaistudioartists.org/studio_tour.html.
1/22/16 Santa Barbara News Press wonderful review by Josef Woodard in the Scene Section for Legacy and Loss!. I love it!- he describes my work as "California neo-cool meets echoes of the early 20th century German expressionist school of "Die Brucke":