Susan Van Sant

About me:

Born on July 17, 1974 at 10:15am in Oskaloosa, Iowa.

Like many great artists before her, Susan Van Sant's childhood had a pivotal effect on her creative inspiration. Raised on a farm in rural Iowa, the youngest of four children, Steve, Ron, and David, who range from twelve to fifteen years older than she, she spent a lot of time alone drawing pictures. Although she considers herself to have been a relatively happy child, she had many personal challenges to overcome at such a young age, and often remembers having felt very lonely.

Susan was raised in a Christian Reformed community, attending both the Christian school and church in Pella, Iowa; she found the religious teachings to be both confusing and cruel which had a profound impact on her young mind.

After having graduated in 1993, she moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan where she attended Calvin College in the hopes to meet other like-minded people, people searching for answers that her small church failed to answer; however, this school proved to be no different. She found the strict religious teachings of the school to be suffocating.

Susan spent a month in India in 1995 where she did a lot of soul searching, and she graduated from Calvin College in 1997 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and she wants to note that during those four years at Calvin, she had not once taken a painting class.

Susan is a self-taught painter, she works with acrylic paint, Golden Acrylic specifically, and in 2005 she started her business "Canvas Menagerie" painting portraits of dogs. In a relatively short time she had become quite successful, having painted "Costello," the Alaskan Malamute that won the Eukanuba Tournament of Champions, and also she had painted a portrait of a Shiba Inu that was presented to the Japanese Government. However, her heart was in surrealism, and for her first couple years she went under the alias "Some Unknown Entity," aka S.U.E. for short; she has participated in "Darkest Dreams, A Lighted Way" art exhibition in St Louis, MO in 2008 and was also in "The Dirty Show" in Detroit, MI in 2009. She still works a day job that is a major setback in her progress as an artist, but she dreams of walking out of corporate America one day soon to be a full time artist.

Susan is in a happy relationship with Ross Morgan, singer and songwriter for the band Holloway, and she has done much collaborative work with them. The most recent work is the CD cover and lyric book for their first album "Illusions," and she also produced the video for the "The Visitor."

Susan's goal is to provide you with artwork that will haunt you in a "brutal yet loving way," and she best describes her work as "the nightmare you cannot shake, the darkest memory you wish to forget; [her] work is beautiful, honest, and often shameless. it is reality, it is fiction, a world that you want to both visit and escape. [Her] work is life." [Susan Van Sant, 2009]