Susan Metzger
After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, she would wake up disheartened for the next 86 mornings, knowing that the oil was still flooding into the Gulf of Mexico. The following year was the tsunami in Japan. She began dreaming of the ocean, frightening dreams of being swept away, being trapped by huge tidal waves, of unavoidable disaster. At the same time there was a personal fixation, the inability to look away from the power, awe and sheer beauty of these huge waves. With each environmental event, and the seemingly inevitability of climate change, her anxieties rose and the dreams persisted. This ‘wave’ body of work grew out of a need to place my focus on the beauty of the waves. She began studying the big wave surfers, people she finds nothing short of heroic — and she started painting the dream images, her personal attempt to transform suffering through beauty. The nightmares stopped. She studied painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA.
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