Busacca Gallery

If you love roses and if you love color, you've found what you want! Painting with her usual flourish and color, Susan Greaves has presented this 24” x 24” oil painting on canvas. The square format adds to its uniqueness and offers creative use of your wall space. The canvas panel, made by Raymar, is canvas adhered to masonite panel with archival glue and sealed on the reverse side. The composition reflects the influence of her master teacher Sergei Bongart, the Russian Impressionist who lived and taught in Los Angeles until 1984.

Link: http://www.myamericanartist.com/

American Artist, August 1988 -----



Determined to study art in spite of her full-time job as a wife and mother, this California artist has made the most of the time available to her. -----



"Shortly before my second child was born, I realized that art was what had been tugging at my heart for all those years," recalls Susan F. Greaves, an artist who resides in Redding in northern California. She began painting regularly, despite the baby, a daughter in nursery school, and a husband (John) - a pathologist - who was working ninety hours a week. -----



Greaves was born in Louisiana and grew up in the city of Monroe. Her introduction to art was not through painting or sculpture but through architecture. She believes that the predominant form of art in Louisiana is architecture, and it was such architecture that led her to major in interior design at Louisiana State University where she attended college. -----



After working briefly as an interior designer, she began to feel that she often had to apply the principles of art in a superficial way. But as a fine artist, she could, as she puts it, "reach deeper into the soul." She loved art, but she had always been taught that a woman should be able to support herself, so pursuing an art career was out of the question. -----



When the Greaves settled in Seattle, Washington, for her husband's residency, she began taking painting classes again - this time with William F. Reese. She says that her work was awful, but she learned more in a year studying with Reese than she had in all her other studies before. She also was to study with Sergei Bongart at his school in Los Angeles and to participate in summer workshops with Reese. -----



Greaves says that because of the constraints of her two full-time "jobs" - wife-mother and artist - she has limited herself to drawing (mostly with pencil and Conte crayon) and painting in oil. "It takes a lot of experience to learn to control a medium and I don't have the time," she points out. -----



Although Greaves does not need the income from her work, she still feels it is important for her to show and sell her paintings. She is a bit isolated where she lives and there is not nearby art market, so she sends her slides out as often as possible. She hopes that after her children get older - they are seventeen (Heather) and thirteen (Wade) - she will be able to travel more to promote her work. "Having my paintings in my closet," she says, "is like having wonderful secrets and not being able to share them." -- Stanley Marcus