Artist Stories. Susan Olij
Every painting, a conversation
What media of art do you work in?
I call myself an abstract painter who doesn’t just paint abstract. As a painter who uses mixed-media and some three dimensional elements on 2D surfaces, my strongest medium is pencil, yet I also use oil, acrylic, casein to ink and watercolours. Always expanding my skills repertoire and experiments. In 2025, I experimented with creating 3D relief on my paintings, using Batik dyes and resists as well as small electronic sound makers.
How would you describe your genre of painting?
I would consider myself a multi-disciplinary artist, I paint, use urban sketching and plein air paintings to inform my studio work.
Describe your creative process. When you begin a painting, do you have an idea of what the end result is? Do you prepare sketches first? Do you know the colors you are going to use?
My creative process starts from observation from the perspective of a third culture adult. Travel painting and sketching on location and sketchbook drawings adds up, and they become the subjects or muse for the series of paintings I do later in my studio. My practice relies on layering, creating unexpected composition, filled with textures that is based on a narrative, a text or a story.
I love yellow, and purple, and also monochrome because its bold and simple. The last 5 years because I also teach sketchbook journaling for travellers, I am mindful to capture and express the shifting light and shadows in every painting.
How do you hope viewers interpret your artwork?
I am interested in offering a mirror, or a window for the viewers to look into their own imagination, a hybrid of the unexpected, the familiar, and the strange. Viewers are invited to slowly observe, at times I invite them to use a magnifying glass to form intimate connections with my artworks. There might be easter eggs, hidden messages, pareidolia (the reading of clouds), Rorschach ink types of psychological reading that can be discovered.
What is your favorite praise you have received from a client/viewer about your work?
Recently, I was told my paintings are evocative, stunning, and quietly thought provoking. A few of my favourite praise given by collectors and viewers.
Outside of being an artist, what are some other things/hobbies you enjoy?
Aside from perpetually learning, I love cooking, dancing to afro cuban and latin music, reading non-fiction, listening to live music, slow travelling, and collecting shoes. I also like to barter small artworks with artist friends and peers.
What is an interesting piece of trivia about you that people don’t know?
I am currently writing a memoir about traveling, combined with a cook-book style art instructions, a collection of all my unconventional teaching methods and mindsets in one book.
Tell us about your family.
My family is a small yet complex motley crew of big personalities—mystic, creative, musical, and pragmatic intellectuals. A perplexing mix of serious, silly, and eccentric people. On my mother's side: Taoist traditions and Confucian work ethics. On my father's side: atheist bankers. From my husband's side: farmers, intellectuals, super tasters, jazz musicians, and tenured professors in psychology and chemistry. There are healers, and of course, artists.
What has been your strongest influence in your art career thus far?
Traveling to new places and observing cultural similarities and differences fascinates me—from the heart of the Peruvian Andes to the kampongs of Yogyakarta, my curiosity about how people tick never fades. I keep a healthy diet of nonfiction humorist authors like Kinky Friedman, David Sedaris, Anaïs Nin, and bell hooks. Essays by Zen philosopher Alan Watts, avant-garde composer John Cage, cult filmmaker David Lynch, fashion illustrator David Downton, and exiled Chinese-French polymath Gao Xingjian.
What is your vision for yourself as an artist 5 years from now?
My artworks, writing, and book(s) displayed in cultural centres of the art world, read by millions of people and help infuse creativity, curiosity and well-healed expressions of what it is to be humble, irreverent and thought provoking human.
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