Inside Out: The Art of Susan Shie
retrospective exhibition
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Watch a video of Susan talking about her
2010 exhibition at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, England.

Susan Shie is an academically trained painter and lifelong sewer who has been making unique and often whimsical painted quilts since 1980. Her quilts are in the collections of the Museum of Arts & Design, the International Quilt Study Center & Museum, and many important private collections, including the John M. Walsh III Collection of Contemporary Art Quilts.

Susan talking about one of her pieces	Susan and Libby sharing the couch. (In case you are wondering, Libby is a North American retriever, a cross between a Labradoodle and a Goldendoodle, also lovingly dubbed a Double Doodle.)

Susan says that to her, art is next to godliness, and her work shows her passionate belief in the spiritual importance of creativity in everyday life. Her art is intensely personal, combining boldly outlined and colored paintings of herself and her friends, family, and pets with images of everyday things like kitchen tools and appliances, pies, vegetables and flowers, and references to peace, politics, and the environment. “I just spent a year and a half being the nanny to my granddaughter, Eva,” she explains. “Being with a very innocent soul so much of the time made me more aware of how important it is for our world to be a safe and whole place for her generation to grow up in.” She describes her art as “personal diary work,” and she fills in everything she paints with detailed spontaneous handwritten diary entries that record whatever she is thinking and feeling at the time. The diary writing, which Susan executes with an AirPen®, adds yet another layer of texture and meaning to her complex work.

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In his introduction to The Kitchen Tarot Guidebook, tarot expert Dennis Fairchild writes: "For the first time in history, the tarot has been sent to the kitchen: the heart of the home. Mountains of ready-to-explode pressure cookers now replace age-old images of lightning-struck castle towers. Wooden spoons now assume the role of sorcerers' magic wands. And 'St. Quilta,' the patron saint of kitchens who wears a teacup for a crown, currently holds the 22 keys to a lush new culinary kingdom of consciousness raising.

The unique beauty of the artwork of The Kitchen Tarot also lies in the fact that the original size of each ranges from three to eight feet tall! Eleven years in the making, [Susan Shie's 22 Major Arcana Kitchen Tarot quilts] represent a brilliant wedding of painting, fresh mixed media artistry, and illustrated diary keeping."

Selections from The Kitchen Tarot are offered below. More are available or in the works, so if you are interested in a particular card or want Susan to personalize a card she has not yet started, please contact us. Susan recently completed Savannah: The Two of Cups for collector John M. Walsh III and did the diary writing on the quilt about Jack and his life and times.