BIOGRAPHY
Susan Turley is a Washington-based painter creating atmospheric, impressionistic abstract images that explore the interrelatedness of light, atmosphere, and human experience. She approaches landscape as inner terrain, where light, space, color, and shifting relationships become expressions of presence. Her work moves through uncertainty, grief, hope, healing, and renewal. Leaving location intentionally ambiguous, Turley invites viewers to enter each painting personally. For her, light is more than illumination: “The light does not remove uncertainty. It accompanies us through it.”
CV
Susan Turley
Olympia, Washington, USA
Contemporary Painter
Susan Turley is a professional artist working primarily in acrylic on canvas. Her studio practice focuses on atmospheric and impressionistic painting, with recurring themes of light, presence, grief, resilience, hope, and renewal.
Representation and Professional Affiliations
2026–2027 — Online Representation, Galería Azur
2026 — Artist profile, ArtBoost
2026 — Professional portfolio development: Light & Atmosphere: The Arc of a Day
Website: susanturley.com
Selected Bodies of Work
Light & Atmosphere
Inner Landscapes
Ocean Series
Turley’s paintings range from abstract and atmospheric compositions to impressionistic landscapes and seascapes. She works through a process of layering, glazing, sanding, scraping, palette knife, dry brush, splatter, and water manipulation, allowing imagery to emerge gradually through the painting process.
Professional Background
Before and alongside her visual art practice, Turley built a long professional career in spiritual care, counseling, education, trauma, grief, and support of Veterans and military families. She is an ordained minister, Board Certified Chaplain, ACPE Supervisor, and Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Her work in these fields has strongly influenced the emotional and spiritual foundations of her art.
Turley is also connected with the documentary film Broken Hearts, Lifted Spirits: Women of the Fallen Speak Their Truth, which centers the experiences of women affected by military loss.
She currently maintains an active studio practice in Olympia, Washington, where she continues to develop new work for exhibition, representation, and professional portfolio presentation.
STATEMENT
My paintings begin with light.
I am interested in the way light changes what we see, but also in how it can suggest presence, memory, uncertainty, and hope. I do not paint specific places as much as emotional and spiritual terrain. Landscape becomes a way of exploring the inner life.
Working primarily in acrylic, I build paintings through layers of glazing, scraping, sanding, dry brush, palette knife, and spontaneous mark-making. I often begin without a fixed image in mind. Instead, I respond to what develops on the surface, allowing color, atmosphere, and movement to guide the painting.
Ambiguity is important to me. I want the viewer to sense a place without being told exactly where it is. A horizon may suggest water, land, distance, or simply transition. Light may appear as illumination, but for me it is also a presence moving through uncertainty.
My work is shaped by decades spent accompanying people through grief, trauma, loss, healing, and major life transitions. Those experiences continue to influence the questions I bring into the studio: How do we live with what cannot be resolved? Where does hope appear? What remains when certainty falls away?
I hope the paintings create a place where viewers can pause, enter, and bring their own experience. The work is not meant to provide answers. It is meant to make room for presence.
