“Susan is just high energy, explains artist and former mentor Deborah Gooch. “She works big, she works aggressively. She is an inspiration for a lot of people who need to see what kind of energy – intellectual, creative energy, physical energy even – that it takes to paint.”

Susan has devoted much of her time to developing her skills as a painter, studying art in America’s major cities: New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. She first signed up to study painting at New York’s progressive New School in Manhattan in the 1960s and has been taking painting classes ever since.

In 1978 the Boumas settled in the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, where Susan continued her art education, establishing an art group with some like-minded painters that was critiqued by the chair of Lake Forest College Art Department professor Michael Croydon, whose work is displayed prominently around Lake Forest. Susan has always found the community and camaraderie with other artists to be both special and inspiring.

Over the years she would occasionally take on commissions, but for the most part painting remained a personal endeavor. However, in the past eight years, she began showing her work – large-scale, bold abstracts painted in acrylic. On the year of her 80th birthday, she showed 23 works in a gallery-like space in Market Square. Almost every painting sold in the first hour of the opening night party. She donated 50% of her earnings to the Women’s Board of the Cancer Research Foundation, which raises money to support cancer research at the University of Chicago.

Today, Susan works out of a studio in Vero Beach, FL. During the COVID crisis, she transformed her Lake Forest garage into a painting studio. In this time of isolation, her energetic process of painting was freeing. 

As described by the curator of one Vero Beach show, “Her colors are her heralds. They flow, they writhe, they blossom, they sweep through the canvas, pulling us in and hauling us along with her to the end. It is an exhilarating journey.”

 Follow Susan Bouma on Instagram @susanl901