Susan
Le Van

Susan Le Van holds an AB in Anthropology from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Printmaking from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 1992 she formed LeVan/Barbee studio with designer Ernest Barbee in Boston, Massachusetts — a digital illustration practice that placed work in Communication Arts, How, Print, the Society of Illustrators, and the Society of Illustrators Los Angeles, and in gallery and museum exhibitions from 1993 onward. She is a Corel Painter Master, featured on the Corel platform, and demoed the software at MacWorld in 1996–97 and in Australia for MetaCreations. She lives in Kingston, Washington, in rural western Washington, where she volunteers at a wildlife rehabilitation center and hikes regularly.

Her current work is collage and paper — a medium she has described as having, in the words of a 2020 Art News piece, “primordial powers.” The subject is encounters with animals: specific individuals she has spent time with, rendered at the moment when two parallel worlds briefly overlap. In Green Bear, Le Van constructs spatial tension through a sharp diagonal axis that divides the composition: a vivid red-orange upper register with gestural black marks and pale brushstrokes contrasts sharply against a lower zone where chartreuse, purple, and butter yellow papers overlap in fractured planes. The collaged papers create a physical topography, their edges and layering asserting the materiality of the surface while the outlined form—rendered in purple and dark line work—oscillates between figure and abstraction, never fully resolving into recognizable anatomy. The work's central problem is its refusal of coherence: the bear shape competes with the color field's own demands, leaving composition and legibility in productive conflict. In Tabby and Yellow Dog, Le Van constructs two animals in violent chromatic opposition: the left cat blazes in cobalt, purple, and rust-orange strokes, while the right dog glows in acidic chartreuse with dark outline, both figures collaged atop newsprint that fragments their forms into legible text. The paper support itself becomes active—yellowed pages curl and layer beneath the figures, their typography creating visual noise that competes with rather than supports the animal imagery. The spatial arrangement pushes the figures into a confrontational standoff, with the dog's reclining pose mirror-opposing the cat's upright stance, yet this potential narrative tension dissolves into pure surface decoration where representation and abstraction hold equal visual weight. In Bear with Salmon, The collage constructs a tense spatial hierarchy through layered paper planes: a moss-green bear dominates the upper third, while rust-red and ochre fish occupy the yellow and cream-colored lower registers, creating a predator-prey relationship across horizontally stacked zones. The artist employs raw paper edges and exposed collage seams as active compositional elements, allowing the textured white ground to function as negative space rather than mere background, while black contour lines drawn across surfaces unify the disparate materials. The chromatic scheme—deep green, mustard yellow, terra cotta, and cobalt blue—produces a deliberately muted palette that resists decorative appeal. A fundamental tension emerges between the simplified, almost naive fish forms and the architecturally complex, wrinkled mass of the bear, suggesting competing scales of representation and meaning. The work carries forward the printmaker’s interest in surface and mark — layered, built up, attentive to the material properties of paper itself.

Human beings and animals seem to exist in parallel universes, but now and again we glimpse one another and our otherwise separate existences overlap. For me there is always a frisson of excitement when this occurs, and my work is an expression of this frozen moment and its inherent wonder, humility, delight, mystery, recognition. The animals in much of my work are specific individuals, and are always animals I’ve spent some time with.