My website bio page says "After work with various media outlets and directing art for a manufacturer, Susan shifted her focus to painting and independent projects while raising a family."

What it really means is that I went to school, worked in advertising for a newspaper, illustrated a book and painted when I could.

I found that I had a husband who didn't want to be married, shortly after which I spent my twenty-third birthday delivering a daughter. That was followed by a return to work in marketing while continuing to paint and juggle and tap dance while twirling flaming batons.

I lived through it and even went on to raise four children while simultaneously staying out of psychiatric hospitals. I don't claim to have done so unmedicated.

Through the 1980s I taught in my studio while producing children, art and exhibits including permanent installation in Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Maryland.

Although rooted in traditional watercolor, during the early 1980s I took a leap of faith and began work on a mixed media series based on fragments of this and that. Over time the focus changed to primarily glimpses of forms found in nature.

In 1986 I accepted the offer for a solo show for the new work which was a huge departure for me. Though hyperventilating through most of the process, it found a fair amount of success.

It was a busy and heady time and how the kids got to soccer, baseball and dance class I don't actually remember.

Having my son sent home from second grade because he showed up with chicken pox was a typical part of that time period. Who knew?

One of the girls - there wound up being three of them - got suspended that year for leading a sit-in protesting the use of half the gym for basketball during the 8th grade dinner dance.

Oh sure; that was a lot of fun.

Mysteriously through no fault of my own there was time to jury a show at the Torpedo Factory Arts Center and to do a show at the US Geological Survey. I was lucky enough to meet a publisher at church and thus was featured in a publication in the DC area about the same time I became associated with a local gallery.

The years went on from there; none of them the same. The art went on as well and, ditto, always taking new twists and turns.

Somehow thirty plus years after my first daughter was born I've turned into the mother of four adults all of whom can cook and use power tools and use the right fork in case they get invited to the White House.

Oh - and I also became someone's nana, which may be more fun than much else I've done.

Still in blue jeans and often wearing red shoes, I'm the woman you notice picking up leaves, coffee stirrers, bottle caps, bits of yarn and just about anything that might make interesting impressions on paper.

My son sends me soap wrappers from Europe. One daughter gives me candy wrappers written in Japanese. Another calls it all Junk and doesn't spell it with a "que". My friends say I have a Magpie gene.