Artist Statement:

I think I was drawing before I was walking and talking; on the backs of advertisements and in the margins of my mother's books. I remember creating wonderful cakes and other confections with damp sand and colored river stones in my sandbox. In my teen years plans for ranch houses and drawings of models with fancy names in fancy fashions appeared on the backs of sample election ballots. Shadow images of drawings remain memorialized on the dining room table top today. As the oldest of five children growing up on a Pennsylvania peach farm, our modest means dictated a practical vocation, and I was encouraged to get an art education degree at a nearby state college. I became a teacher, explored the United States, lived briefly in the Bay Area and backtracked to New Mexico. I did social work on Indian reservations, was a writer-consultant and public information officer, a wife and mother. Turns I made led me right back to where I started - a clean surface on which to draw and a tool in hand to make a mark.

My world of red mesas, mountains and deserts continues to fascinate me. Viewing a bent horizon line, the Earth's curvature, sucks the breath right out of me. Witnessing the strange, yellowish light of each February whirls me back to my impressions of New Mexico when it was new to me many years ago. This place and time inspires me, makes me feel I belong. But it is creating beauty on silk with dyes and brushes that makes me feel inspired and complete.

~ Suzanne Visor