By Karolyn Gephart
The art of Friendswood watercolorist Susan Steinberg is featured at the Galveston Art League in their Member Show, highlighting one artist’s work for a month.
Steinberg’s work will be on display at the GAL Gallery as well as online from March 28 to April 28, 2024.
Steinberg took a scientific route to arrive at the subjects she chose for her watercolors. She has a PhD in horticulture and, for many years, studied plants and their interaction with their environment. Her paintings are the results of artistic studies of plants and landscapes.
She explained that as a scientist, she would study how water flows through the soil to plant roots and then through the plant. Water flows through the porous media, which is soil influenced by pore size, chemical properties, and gravity.
“Watercolor painting is an investigation of the physics of flow through the porous media that is paper. It harnesses the interaction of capillary and gravity forces, pigment, water, and paper into controlled or chaotic color flows, granulations, and glazes,” she wrote in her bio for GAL.
Steinberg says her favorite color is made from sunlight streaming through leaves. She explained how the Japanese call it Komorebi, or the scattered sunlight filtering through a tree canopy. The English words for it are sunbeams, crepuscular rays, dappled light, or shafts of light.
Instead of researching light and photosynthesis in leaves, she now captures how light is transmitted through or reflected from water, stone, soil, bark, leaves, or petals with paint and paper.
She looks at the complexity of a scene in the natural world, and her work captures from it the essence of form, pattern, light, and color that exists. Steinberg has created watercolors from Keukenhof Flower Garden near Amsterdam, what she has seen from the car window on the road from Santa Fe to Los Alamos, leaf litter she found on the forest floor, and even from a shrub she noticed in a hotel parking lot.
Her colors are vibrant, and her topics transform easily through her talented brushwork. Her paintings are available for viewing and purchasing online and at the GAL gallery.
The Galveston Art League features monthly shows in their gallery at 2117a Postoffice St. in downtown Galveston.
The Galveston Art League has operated for over 100 years to support visual arts and art education. Its hours are Thursday through Sunday, noon to 6 p.m. For more information, visit https://galvestonartleague.com/.
