Susan Allen

Artist Statement / Biography

Susan Heuck Allen is a plein air painter in oil and watercolor. She studied painting at Amherst College and the Cincinnati Art Academy and print-making at the Providence Art Club. Allen has illustrated digs in Greece and Cyprus and exhibited in faculty shows and galleries in Michigan, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island where she is an Exhibiting Member of the Providence Art Club. Locally, she has had solo exhibitions in all three galleries of the Jaffrey Civic Center and has work in “Humanity and Nature in the Monadnock Region” at the Historical Society of Cheshire County from June through September, 2022.

Allen worked at the National Geographic Society, is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Classics, Brown University, and has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Smith College, Providence College, Tufts, and Yale University as well as on a ship that circumnavigated the globe, known as Semester at Sea. A national and international lecturer, Allen has appeared in History and Discovery Channel films, lectured on Mediterranean and European cruises, and spoken at the Amos Fortune Forum.
From her studio overlooking Monadnock, Allen draws her inspiration from total immersion in nature, daily swimming at dawn in Silver Lake and Lake Huron, as well as foraging for wild mushrooms in nearby forests. She once won a silver medal swimming the legendary Hellespont, from Asia to Europe and in 2019 climbed the Pyrenees as part of a 500-mile pilgrimage in France and Spain, known as the Camino of Santiago de Compostela where she painted along the way.

Allen paints landscapes of New Hampshire, Greece, and the Great Lakes, approaching painting as a meditation and aiming to produce healing work that the viewer may contemplate and inhabit as a respite from life’s stresses. She looks forward to another summer of painting on the slopes of her favorite mountain.