Artist Susan Eckenwalder made her first clay pot and Willendorf Venus at the age of six. She then found herself graduating from Reed College with a degree in art. From there she went to the University of Nebraska for an MFA (clay and bronze). She had wanted to be a novelist or nuclear physicist, sigh, but she did marry a botanist, yea, so all was not lost.

After stints as an assistant professor at the Corpus Christi State University (now part of Texas A&M) and the University of Nebraska, she moved to Toronto, Canada, and began a zigzagging career as a studio artist, editor for the Ontario Crafts Council (244 deadlines a year) and teacher/coordinator for Sheridan College’s Craft and Design department. She also spent one full summer as an artist in residence (Leighton Colony) at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

In 2009, she discovered just seven minutes away the Neilson Park Creative Centre with its wonderful assortment of studios and classes, plus a large gallery. Forsaking her extensive knowledge of clay, metal, and glass (beads), she began to paint.

“Time is a variable that makes no sense. Yet there it is. The oddness of birth, with its vast unknown before, and the swift inevitability of death, with its great blank hereafter. These eggs, tombs, and figures metaphorically draw on myths and ancient images to describe a knowable time between. Left is the perplexing question of what an artist leaves behind. Are these paintings going to become so many grave goods, finding a place within the long history of art concerns: birth, fertility, life, death, all embedded in incomprehensible time? Or will they simply rot." 

From Infinite Regret and other Paintings
Solo show at the David Kaye Gallery, 2018