Susan Jamison: The Divine Feminine

by Charles McGuigan 05.2025

On summer days that lasted close to an eternity, she would leave the small three-room house early in the morning and enter the forest through a curtain of trees and begin her wandering, and she could name the small plants and flowers that erupted from the fecund soil and knew the names of the birds that moved from ground to treetop, and she would lie down in a bed of moss and look up into the sky and see how the sunlight filtered down like a carefully tatted lace, and she felt the warmth of the day on her skin and felt the pulse of the entire living world through every nerve ending in her body, and she would construct along the banks of the lake a tiny house crafted of mud and stones that might become the home of a frog or a toad or a salamander, and then she would wade into the water and swim to the center, then dive to the bottom twenty feet below where she would retrieve a single leaf, and then she would make her way home very late in the afternoon, and she and her parents would cast lines into the lake and draw forth bluegills and bass and catfish that her father would gut and her mother would fry up in an iron skillet over the ash-coated orange coals of an open fire.

“That left such a huge impression on who I am as a person, and then later, on who I became as an artist,” Susan Jamison tells me. “My mother really knew all about the wild flowers and the birds. I remember the day we saw a kingfisher.  We would spend time trying to identify the butterflies and the birds and she would talk about what the symbolic meaning of an animal could be. ‘What did the spider symbolize?’ she asked. ‘Look at the beautiful web she’s weaving, the web she’s creating, and how she’s catching her food.’ She would tell these little stories. Tell me why sighting a fox is so rare. ‘They’re stealthy,’ she would say. ‘They’re secretive, they don’t show themselves very much, so when they do it’s special.’ Later on, these things came out in my artistic iconography. It was extraordinary to grow up that way.”

At that time her family lived in Carmel, Indiana, a sprawling suburb outside of Indianapolis, and her father, who worked for the soil conservation service, found a large parcel of land in the rolling hills of southern Indiana near the Kentucky border. It would become the family’s retreat they would frequent on weekends and during the summers. Her father had a tiny three-room house moved to the parcel and had a bulldozer carve two holes into the earth down to the limestone beds, and the underground springs filled them, creating a pond and a lake that he stocked with bluegills, bass and catfish. There was no electricity and no running water. 

“And so we would bring water with us and we had one of those huge old Coleman coolers to keep the food cold,” Susan remembers. “To me, as a child, it was normal. It was only when I got older and relayed this experience to other people that I realized we were living like the wilderness family.”

From a very early age, Susan created. “I was always drawing and coloring, but not in coloring books,”she says. “My mom made sure I had a sketch pad and colored pencils and the 64 box of Crayola crayons and I was always making pictures. The other thing I really liked to do was make doll house furniture and redecorate this doll house I had. And I would make weird little sculptures.”

In Indiana she had an elementary school teacher who could see the young girl’s talent. “That art teacher told my mother, ‘You know your daughter has an exceptional ability and you need to nurture that and she’ll be an artist some day,’” says Susan. She also scored high on the IQ tests, and in fifth grade was already reading on a twelfth grade level. 

In 1976, when her father got a job with the federal government in Washington, the family moved to Oakton.  “Growing up in Northern Virginia I can’t say was a good experience for me,” Susan says. “The people in the neighborhood where we moved into had a whole lot more money than my parents did. They had BMWs and Mercedes in the driveway and we had an Oldsmobile. I got picked on a lot for not having the right clothes. It was the time designer jeans had become popular, and I didn’t have Calvin Kleins. I didn’t really fit in. I wasn’t good at socializing anyway. I was the weird kid.”

After surviving Oakton High School, Susan attended James Madison University where she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree. And in some ways, art school wasn’t really a choice for Susan.”There was never a point in my whole entire life where I didn’t know that I’m an artist,” she says. “I’m just an artist. There was no making a decision about it. It was just, I know this is what I do.”

At JMU she took every photography and printmaking class she could take. She remembers one of her photography instructors there, a guy named Steve Zapton. “Every year he would put us in a van and take us to New York and we would stay in this super seedy motel in Times Square,” says Susan. “He would tell stories about when he was at Pratt, living in New York. He would say things like, ‘And then I was going down towards the Guggenheim and I saw Alexander Calder eating a donut, and I nearly got hit by a car. But what a way to go.’”

But it was Steve’s scrupulous attention to detail during his critiques that made the deepest impression on Susan. “Most students hated him because he would pick at us so hard,” she says. “But because of who I am as a person, I really liked it. No matter what you did, it wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t quite refined enough. I remember him looking at this piece I had put up for critique and he started telling this crazy story about a kite show he had gone to see, and how there was this miniature kite on display. It was so small that you had to look at it through a magnifying glass and the tail of the kite was a human hair and there were tiny little bows on it. He always had some way of telling you about something that made you say, ‘Oh, okay, I get it.’ His critiques really clicked for me.”

And then she mentions Jack McCaslin a printmaking professor who would become department head. “He was one of the teachers that was beloved by almost everybody who took his classes,” says Susan. “He was really interested in world music so he always had music playing in the studio that was from all around the world.  It was a really fun atmosphere. A lot of us, instead of going out to parties, would hang out in the printmaking studio on Friday and Saturday night and listen to the music and work on our art. That’s one of my strongest memories from my educational experience—that sense of community.”

After completing her studies at JMU, Susan attended the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) where she was awarded a master of fine arts degree in painting. She learned a lot about process there. Susan tells me about a class she took called Renaissance Painting Techniques.  “We learned how to make an oil painting where you first do an underpainting in black and white and Venetian red,” she says. “And then you create glazes for the colors over the top of the underpainting. And that is why those Renaissance paintings have that glow about them.”

She also learned how to do gilding with gold leaf and red clay. And it was here too that she began working in egg tempera and learned how to make her own archival cardboard panels and true gesso from rabbit skin glue and finely milled marble powder.

While attending classes at RISD, Susan also worked as a teaching associate in the visual arts department at nearby Brown University.  But after graduation, Susan was unable to find a job, so she packed up her belongings in a U-Haul and headed south to Virginia and moved in with her parents who were then living in Bedford County. 

“It was a walkout basement and I lived there, and tried to regroup and tried to figure out what to do,” she says. “I was pretty depressed. I couldn’t land a job.”

Late one night she heard a rapping on the French door in her room. She went to investigate, switched on a light, and through a pane of glass she saw something that caused her heart to skip a beat. It was a gigantic luna moth—creamy lime-green wings, solid white body, and those four penetrating eye spots. Susan burst into tears and thought this: Oh my God this is a messenger to tell me there’s rebirth, there’s new life, there’s something coming. 

“It was this night messenger coming to tell me something,” Susan recalls. “Things like that started happening then because I was living closer to nature again. So I started having experiences like that.”

She later moved out of her parents’ home, rented an apartment in Roanoke, worked for a time at Emerson Creek Pottery in Bedford, and entered her artwork in Roanoke’s Annual Sidewalk Art Show. “I had this thought that whatever opportunity presented itself, I would do it,” Susan says. She won best in show, along with a $1500 prize. She then took the advice of an artist that she met at the show. He suggested she print up business cards that featured a small image of one of her paintings. Susan did just that, and began checking out galleries in Richmond, Charlotte, and Washington. In Richmond, she handed her card to to John Pollard at ADA Gallery and that led to a very successful show. In Washington, Irvine Contemporary began showing her work, which led to selling her art at fairs in New York and the smaller fairs during Art Basel Miami Beach. 

 “The people that showed up were big-time rabid art collectors,” says Susan. “They sold a bunch of my work down there. That’s how I moved from working at a pottery to making a living off my artwork.”

Changes in her art were coming. In the early 2000s she began studying botanical and naturalist illustrations, and was struck by an Audubon watercolor of hummingbirds done on stark white paper. What if I made a painting that had that airy feeling? she asked herself.  

She began questioning some of the things she had learned in college. “I felt like artists learn the secret art language and we make this work that is according to that secret art bible and we communicate with each other,” Susan tells me. “We put ourselves in this box and alienate normal people who don’t have that kind of background.  Like somebody could be really great at plumbing, but not understand anything about art. So how do I communicate with that person, how do I pull them into my world.?”

Susan began putting human figures into her work along with birds and other animals, and flowers. “Those archetypal animal symbols are stamped into our DNA, passed down over the centuries, along with stories that have inherent meaning,” Susan says. “People have an association there. I started purposefully making paintings with people, mostly women, along with animals and flowers’

She began to understand that she, like all artists, visual and otherwise, was a conduit of a sort.  It was liberating. “The muse gives the creative the idea and the artist or the writer or the musician makes the thing and in that way you can separate yourself from your ego investment,” Susan says. “So in the past few years I think the further I get away from that MFA experience the more comfortable I am talking about getting visions. I think there is a bit of a spiritual awakening going on with some people presently, and more people are open to hearing things like this.”

About seven years ago, something strange started happening. Susan began to hear very clear messages. Spoken messages, not like the visual messages that had inspired her earlier work. “Here’s what it said, ‘Depict the Divine Feminine, It’s time for her return,’” Susan remembers. “You know you’re not imagining that you’re hearing a message when you don’t know what it means.” Eventually she would understand its meaning, but she was somewhat hesitant about stealing another people’s cultural imagery that represented the Divine Feminine. 

So what’s my cultural imagery? she asked herself. “I was raised Catholic and I’m not a practicing Catholic, but I’m also not somebody who’s angry and bitter about it,” says Susan. “I have decided not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

That Divine Feminine manifests itself in Mary the Mother, Mary Magdalene, and Mother Earth.  “The Divine Feminine is not pro-woman or anti-men,” Susan says. “All people have a masculine and a feminine side,  at least balanced people have those aspects. Unbalanced people can go too far one way or too far another way, and that can be destructive. They talk about toxic masculinity, well, there’s toxic femininity, too.”

A while back Susan made a painting called PowerBear which features a massive bear with a cutaway that in its torso that reveals a full-grown woman curled in a fetal position. When Susan had finished making that painting she realized it was a reflection of her own persona. “I have to put that bear on to go out in the world and give a lecture,” she says. “I have to kind of puff myself up a little bit in order to do that.”

When the painting was featured in an art show at Longwood University, she noticed a man standing in front of it who seemed mesmerized. 

Susan approached him.

“What do think of that?” she asked.

“Well, it’s me,” he said. “I am the bear and the woman inside of it is the feminine part of me that’s hidden away.”

For Susan it was one of those moments that confirm the power of real art: It communicates with us, shows us things that we have either forgotten or were never consciously aware of. 

“I swear to God I almost started crying when he said that,” she tells me. “That’s the total opposite of my experience of the painting. That was so meaningful to me to have that response and for that reason when people ask me what a painting is about I always say, ‘I have a story behind it and I can tell you that, however I would love to hear what you think first.’ I want for people to know that their experience of the images I make is just as important as mine.”

It’s no surprise that her works are in the permanent collections of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Mint Museum, the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University, and the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts. 

Like all great works of art, Susan Jamison’s paintings speak to us and move us closer to universal truths. One of those great truths is what is happening right before our eyes to the Mother of all Life. 

“Mother Earth is our ultimate Divine Feminine,” Susan says. “I think of the Earth as a feminine being, giving life to every one of us, yet we are making our best effort to destroy Her.  So I think a lot of my work will continue to have ecological themes, and I think it’s headed more strongly that way. Every character that’s coming up for me right now is the Divine Feminine, but she is angry. Like Hecate.”