Susan Nicolini was born in 1947 in Long Island City, New York. When visiting her grandmother as a child, she expressed herself with finger paints and crayons . Her innermost impressions of her life's journey began to unfold. She graduated High School in 1965 and went to work in her first full time position in New York City. Two years later she married. While her husband was finishing college, Susan applied to United Air Lines for a stewardess position and was selected. The magnificence of the aerial landscapes she witnessed daily were catalogued in her memory as future material to later interpret. Unfortunately, her marriage did not survive, but its demisen served as the catalyst in the search for her true self. Buoyed by a strong survivor's spirit, her journey began anew.

She moved to New York City and began working for a company that manufactured "Varityper" typesetting equipment and Multigraphics offset printing presses. A new world had just "opened up" in the graphic arts. It was a time of learning and then teaching to clients, what she had been taught. She began perfecting her skills in computerized typesetting which allowed Susan to be a self employed freelance artist. It was at this time, in 1979, that Susan applied to the "Art Student's League of New York" for her first formal art lessons in Life Drawing, Portraiture, Painting and Composition. She worked in oil and discovered many techniques using her brushes. She loved doing figure drawing in charcoal as it was so similar to painting. She technically sketched a composition using raw umber and a #6 Filbert brush. Today, she is a life member of the League.

Susan continued to paint and study but when she realized her paintings were not providing a sustainable income, she relocated to New Jersey where she learned the craft of custom framing at the Jacob Swerdlow Gallery. Before the year was finished, she established her third career in custom framing. As a self supporting artist, she continued to paint in a figurative fashion until a traumatic accident changed her life once again. There were physical damages that required surgeries after the fact. Susan knew she needed to release these emotions somehow, and discovered she was painting abstractly. The accident served as a vehicle to another freer language in her painting, and she embraced acrylics which enabled her to work faster, using pallet knives, painting rollers and her own fingers.

Susan is currently retired from professional business, but not from painting. She lives in the Catskill Mountains, not too far from Woodstock, New York. She continues to study at the Woodstock School of Art, and is an active member of the Woodstock Artist Association & Museum in addition to many other local arts organizations. She is presently commissioned for a corporate office in Stamford, Conn.

Susan is still painting figuratively as well as abstractly...in alkyds and acrylics.. Seeing from the higher perspective of a life in the mountains, her "spirit" wings are now soaring above and manifest in her work..