Susan Antoinette
St Petersburg, FL
Susan Antoinette is a St. Petersburg abstract painter transforming memory and place into layered, poetic landscapes shaped by color and movement.
Message
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 personal histories and location shape identity.
Primarily self-directed in her artistic development, Antoinette has furthered her training at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, Virginia, and 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, Art Students League of New York, and LeMoyne Arts Center. She has presented multiple solo exhibitions and maintains an active exhibition record spanning more than a decade.
Antoinette’s paintings are held in private collections throughout the United States, including California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, Washington D.C., and Wisconsin.
Antoinette holds a juried resident studio in one of St. Petersburg’s premier locations. Her studio is located within their thriving arts community, the ArtsXchange. She contributes to the cultural vitality of St. Petersburg’s arts community. She serves on the Board of Directors of the St. Pete Arts Alliance and participates on the SPAA Education Committee and the Studio@620 Education Committee. Through artist talks, professional development workshops, and collaborative programming, she helps connect artists with museums, galleries, and arts professionals.
Statement
As an abstract painter, I build each work through a synthesis of texture, layered color, gestural line, and embedded text. My process is intuitive yet deliberate. I allow paintings to unfold organically while engaging in a rigorous multi-step approach that includes mark-making, glazing, palette knife work, brushwork, and often the use of my hands to create varied depth and surface complexity.
Memory, geography, and human connection are central to my practice. Inspired by travel, community building, education, social justice, environmental awareness, and diversity, my work frequently incorporates inverse ekphrasis—painting in response to poetry. I draw from writers such as Mary Oliver and Young Pueblo, selecting language that examines presence, resilience, and belonging. Using a 1945 Smith Corona typewriter, I type selected text onto deconstructed vintage maps, which are then layered, embedded, and fused into the painting’s surface. The map fragments reference place and migration, while the poetry introduces narrative tension and emotional resonance.
The act of deconstructing maps and reassembling them within abstraction mirrors the way memory functions—fragmented, layered, and reconstructed over time. My paintings hold both structure and spontaneity, inviting viewers to navigate shifting terrains of color, movement, and meaning.
Painting is both release and inquiry. While the work often emerges from personal experience, it does not illustrate a single story. Instead, it offers visual language—dense with texture and saturated with chromatic energy—that encourages individual interpretation. I intentionally create areas of visual intensity balanced by moments of rest, allowing the viewer’s eye to travel, pause, and reconsider.
The brain is wired to make connections between aesthetic elements and emotional memory. Through layered surfaces and embedded text, I invite viewers to move beyond observation and into immersion. Small marks and subtle shifts in color reward close looking, while broader gestures create a visceral, sensory response.
Ultimately, my work seeks to hold complexity: personal and collective memory, chaos and order, fragmentation and cohesion. Each painting becomes a constructed landscape—one that asks the viewer not only to look, but to look within.