When I moved here two years ago from the flat prairies of Chicago, Susan Hall’s work first captured the rolling hills and watery mosaics of West Marin for me. For a year I bought her cards in shops around town before I walked into her studio, saw her remarkable canvases and began to know the woman behind the artwork.
In her current exhibition of recent work at the art gallery at Toby’s Feed Barn, the landscape paintings and ceramics create a unified vision of color and form that reflect the artist’s strong sense of place. No wonder: Susan Hall was raised within walking distance of Toby’s and has lived in and loved this unique landscape throughout her lifetime.
From the commanding “Night Poetry with Crescent Moon” to the intimate “Laundry in the Wind” or the whimsical figures on her ceramic plates, the artist invites us to enter into the harmonious world that reflects her maturity, strength of spirit and sense of humor.
Susan’s landscapes capture the palette of West Marin, the ochre and sage green drifts of the hills, the indigo of the night sky, with well-placed accents of a white house or black birds. Susan has a gift for simplifying space for us, abstracting the forms of the water, fog, hills and sky, and organizing them in a way that invites us to enter the scene in an approachable way.
Her canvases are touched by light in mystical ways, often exploring how form emerges from darkness. I find that the most memorable moments in her paintings come from light reflecting off a tidal pool, glinting off a crashing wave or bathing an entire scene in the light of the full moon that shows up so often in her work.
While Susan is that rare true local who lives in the house where she was raised, she brings a far larger perspective to her work. After graduating from Tomales High School, Susan pursued formal training as an artist, receiving a bachelor’s degree from California College of Arts and Crafts and a masters from Berkeley, where she received encouragement from the well-known colorist Mark Rothko.
Susan kept going until she reached New York City, where she lived for 22 years. She was deeply involved in the dynamic art scene, teaching at Sarah Lawrence and showing her work at galleries and museums as prestigious as the Whitney. Susan’s work from her New York period features representational figures and scenes in a dusky, urban palette—quite different from the Point Reyes landscapes.
Her iconic style emerged after she returned to Point Reyes in 1992. Susan speaks openly about “getting clean” from the drugs and alcohol that were so much a part of the New York art scene in the ‘70s.
“Little by little, I began to reframe basic notions of myself, she wrote in her memoir River Flowing Home. “I came to see I was a steward for my gift and abilities—physical, artistic, and intellectual. This meant that I had to nurture my talents like a gardener and share them with the world.”
Here she has established a well-grounded life with her husband Steve McKinney. Together they have turned the three acres of her childhood property into a haven of home, garden, studio and creative structures where people, plants and animals mingle in a kind of beautiful harmony that is reflected in Susan’s work. Her audience benefits from the clarity of her hard-won vision, in which she paints with the depth of understanding that is akin to poetry.
We are most fortunate that Susan Hall, a nationally acclaimed artist, returned to live and work in our midst. As I walked around the exhibition, the words of the poet T. S. Eliot rolled though my head: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Susan Page Tillett lives in Inverness. She is the executive director of the Mesa Refuge, a writers’ retreat in Point Reyes. She moved to West Marin in 2013 after 30 years of supporting the work of writers and artists in Chicago.
Susan Hall’s exhibition started Oct. 1 and closes Oct. 29.