Susan Shatter (1943-2011) was one of the great champions of contemporary watercolor painting, and a virtuoso of the medium.  A native New Yorker, she studied at Boston University, Pratt Institute and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, and was the subject of over thirty solo exhibitions. 

Her inspiration was the raw, American landscape, particularly desert and ocean. Her painterly vision hedges toward liquid abstraction, yet she captures the essential spirit of place in all her work.  Shatter’s engaging paintings tangle the eye in an expressionist field of brushstrokes and color. Even the sounds of these remote places to seem emanate from her paintings, whether the quiet winds of the Utah desert or the crashing waves of the Maine coast.

Shatter was very active in the artistic community. She was President of the National Academy of Design just before her death, a regular colonist at Yaddo, and she received numerous grants and awards, such as a Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant, Childe Hassam Purchase Award, American Academy of Arts & Letters, New York State Foundation for the Arts Grant, National Endowment for the Arts Grant, the William Paton Prize, National Academy of Design, among others.

Her work is in numerous museum collections including the National Academy of Design, The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, The Boston Public Library, and Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, CT to name a few.