Born in 1930, Susan Bright Lautmann Hertel grew up in Highland Park, Illinois outside Chicago and spent her summers at Lake Geneva Wisconsin and later Arizona, experiences that fostered a life-long and deep attachment to both the natural world and Native American life. A lover of nature, Hertel ran Barking Dog Ranch in Glendora California where she raised Arabian horses, Nubian goats, cats, dogs, chickens, and various other animals. Later, when living in New Mexico, she lived in a small passive solar adobe and raised horses.
In 1948 Hertel studied art at Scripps College in Claremont CA. under Millard Sheets for whom she would later work as studio assistant. A twenty-six-year collaboration followed including the production of public murals, sculpture, architectural works, and stained glass. Hertel consider painting to be her primary focus throughout, developing a style that leaned heavily on her skills as a muralist. Working from photographs Hertel would begin with drawings and gouache color sketches, working through compositional arrangements, which would lead her to full size oil paintings. Hertel exhibited with Elaine Horwitch in Santa Fe, Ankrum Gallery, Los Angeles, and with Barbara Beretich Gallery in Claremont California
Susan Hertel’ depictions of every-day life are often filtered through her own lens. Placed high on the canvas, the focus here is less on the young woman enjoying a morning view out of a bedroom window, and almost completely on the patterns and folds of the bed covering. Hertel joins a long history of artists who depicted the interior, Van Gogh and his bedroom at Arles, the many bathing paintings of Paul Cezanne and Pierre Bonnard, and the moody rooms of Vermeer, though here she discards nearly all use of expressive color leaning heavily on her deft attention to pattern and shape. Among Hertel’s greatest influences is the work of Pierre Bonnard who himself was a follower of Paul Gaugin and devotee of Japanese graphic arts. Of a trip to Europe at the age of 25 Hertel recalled…
“The most important thing happened just days before I came home. In Paris, I saw my first Bonnards. They opened up a whole new wing for me. Here was a painter who organized shapes and patterns in a way that was completely compelling to me, and his subjects were from his own personal environment. That, I realized, was what I wanted to paint also.”