About Susan Antoinette

Susan Antoinette is an abstract expressionist painter based in St. Petersburg, Florida. Working with layered color, gestural mark-making, embedded poetry, and deconstructed vintage maps, she creates paintings that explore memory, geography, and human connection. Having lived across the United States—from Wisconsin to Colorado, California, Virginia, Maryland, and now Florida—Antoinette transforms fragments of place into richly textured emotional landscapes, examining how our experiences of place become part of the journeys we carry with us.

Primarily self-directed in her artistic development, Antoinette has complemented her independent practice with sustained training under Marsha Steiger at The Art League School in Alexandria, Virginia, and with Frank O’Cain and, more recently, Peter Bonner at The Art Students League of New York. Her work has been exhibited nationally in museums and galleries including Gadsden Arts Center & Museum, Racine Art Museum / Wustum Fine Arts Museum, The Art Students League of New York, and LeMoyne Arts Center. She has presented solo exhibitions and maintains an active exhibition record spanning more than a decade.

Alongside her studio practice, Antoinette has spent more than two decades as an Exceptional Student Educator, an experience that has deepened her enduring interest in individual experience, human connection, and the many ways people navigate the world.

Her paintings are held in private collections throughout the United States, including Florida, Colorado, California, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, Virginia, Washington, Washington D.C., and Wisconsin.

Antoinette maintains a juried resident studio at the ArtsXchange, a thriving artist community in St. Petersburg’s Warehouse Arts District. Her engagement extends beyond the studio through leadership, education, and collaborative programming that contributes to the cultural vitality of the city. She serves on the Board of Directors of the St. Pete Arts Alliance (SPAA) and participates on its Education, Marketing, and Special Events Committees, as well as the Studio@620 Education Committee. Through facilitating artist talks, professional development workshops, and collaborative programs, she helps create connections among artists, museums, galleries, and arts professionals.

My paintings explore how memory, place, and human connection shape the inner landscapes we carry. Inspired by travel, relationships, community, cultural experiences, environmental awareness, and moments of personal change, I create abstract works that consider how our individual journeys—though deeply personal—connect us through shared human experiences.

As an abstract expressionist painter, I build each work through texture, layered color, gestural line, and, in selected pieces, deconstructed maps and embedded text. My process is both intuitive and intentional. Working with brushes, palette knives, and often my hands, I develop surfaces gradually, allowing earlier marks and materials to remain visible beneath each new layer. Some paintings begin with a color, a remembered place, or a line of poetry. Others begin simply as a question, and I follow the work without knowing exactly where it will lead.

Travel has deepened my awareness of the ways place shapes memory, identity, and belonging. Maps enter my work as both physical material and metaphor. Their fragments suggest location, movement, borders, and distance, while also representing the less visible routes we navigate through relationships, uncertainty, loss, resilience, and personal discovery. Deconstructing and reassembling them reflects the way memory functions—fragmented, layered, and continually reconstructed over time.

Poetry offers another point of entry into my work. Rather than illustrating a poem, I sometimes create in response to its language, allowing the words to begin a visual conversation. Using my 1951 Smith-Corona typewriter, I type selected passages onto fragments of vintage maps and incorporate them into the painted surface. Some words remain legible, while others become partially concealed beneath later layers—still present even when they can no longer be fully read. Like memory, nothing disappears completely.

Although my paintings often emerge from personal experience, they are not intended to communicate a single story or fixed meaning. Areas of visual intensity are balanced by quieter moments, inviting the eye to travel, pause, and return. A seemingly simple palette may reveal unexpected complexity, while fragmented marks gradually find cohesion.

Painting, for me, is both release and inquiry. I want viewers to slow down, spend time with the work, and bring their own memories and experiences into the encounter. If they recognize something of their own journey within these layered terrains—even something they cannot fully explain—then the work has created the connection I seek.

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