BY KATE WATTERS
“You need to have faith in the process,” artist Suze Woolf says emphatically, using her paintbrush to punctuate her point. Suze, a full-time, self-taught watercolor artist, is a woman of exorbitant energy in a compact, athletic frame.
True to her own teachings that “watercolor rewards boldness,” she volunteered to drive from her home in Seattle to the middle of nowhere in House Rock Valley, take up residence at the remote 1877 Kane Ranch headquarters building, on the North Rim Ranches, and get busy painting.
Watercolor, as a medium, affords Suze spontaneity and speed. With her portable paint set, she can begin a painting in moments and finish within hours.
During her stay, places like Coyotte Buttes, the Vermilion Cliffs, and Triple Alcove served as her plein air studio. According to Suze, who draws inspiration from Los Angeles artist Robert Irwin’s biography, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, “seeing begins when naming ends.”
Her strokes of vermilion blend with turquoise, and she’s the first to admit that she’s not a slave to reality.
Instead of trying to exactly render the scene, she infuses her personality into every painting. The looseness of her thick brush strokes breaks open the sky, lighting up the crack that is Marble Canyon and making the grasslands dance.
See more of Suze's North Rim Ranches paintings ›
Kate Watters is a former Volunteer Program director for the Grand Canyon Trust.
