Susan Wilder was born and raised in a small town in upstate New York. She received her BFA in Drawing from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and went on to study Surface Design (Textile) at UCLA and completed a certificate in Scientific Illustration from California State University, Long Beach, California. Her love of drawing has stayed the focal point of her work. She has taught extensively at the college level as well as informal workshops in both California and New England and is currently a faculty member and Dean at Heartwood College of Art in Biddeford, Maine.“My practice embraces both abstract and representational styles, and includes a love of avian and botanical forms as well as a fascination for the regularity in pattern and ornamentation. Birds are a given, a magnificent reminder to live daily, both on the ground and in the air. Micro views of all living forms, Islamic geometry and even the dovetailing repetition in old wooden boats all highlight a perceptual sensitively to pattern recognition in my work. Connections solve puzzles…Coracle, Areole, Enso…We all live in a round world. Why not draw it?” It is as if in the predawn, before the light begins to lift edges into being, I am trying maybe, to paint holiness. - John Updike