Using collage, paint, and found materials, Susan Tompkins creates vivid, textural mixed media paintings of metaphoric abstract landscapes that trace growth and the transformation of self. Her physical process involves layering, tearing, cutting, and rearranging. She works the way landscapes form, building through accumulation, renewal, and response of materials. An unexpected color or torn edge can push the whole piece in a new direction. Sometimes she uses actual maps as a lens for memory and inner terrain, tracing how personal histories, movement, and lived experience reshape the shifting boundary between outer geography and inner landscape.
The work grows out of a desire for reorientation, an ongoing need to adjust, recalibrate, and find footing as the world around us continues to change. Each piece is a self-portrait or mirror for viewers navigating their own reorientation. Her art is a meditation on the fluid state of our individual realities. Consciously or subconsciously, we are all actively choosing how we exist in the world; our way of being is itself a choice.
The mountains she hikes, the plants in her immediate neighborhood, and the varieties of Southern California landscape all inform her imagery. Patterns, organic shapes, and vibrant colors found in aerial photography, molecular, or geological structures are also sources of inspiration. Forms curve, overlap, and transform as they take shape, echoing the same accumulation and response that drive her personal growth. Fascinated by nature's strength, resilience, and defiance, Tompkins expresses the potentials of reflection to build towards healing and renewal. The work is sometimes pure abstraction, but always carries the trace of a landscape: a mountain range, a cloud formation, a portal opening onto something else, another individual reality coming into form.
Originally from New Jersey, Tompkins has lived and worked in Los Angeles for the past 25 years. She holds a BFA from Manhattanville University and further studied art and art history at UCLA. Recent exhibitions include group shows at TAG of Los Angeles, Drawing Rooms Gallery of Jersey City, New Jersey, and the Nan Rae Gallery at Woodbury University. In 2023, she completed a public art commission for the City of Burbank, Let Dreams Take Flight. In 2025, she received a Center for Cultural Innovation Development Grant supporting her development. From 2025-2026, she participated in Shoebox Projects Call & Response, a four month long collaborative art book project, which culminated in a 2026 exhibition at the StartUp Art Fair in Venice, CA. Her art world influences include Abstract Expressionists such as Lee Krasner, the later works of Frank Stella, and her mentor, New York artist Randy Williams.
The work grows out of a desire for reorientation, an ongoing need to adjust, recalibrate, and find footing as the world around us continues to change. Each piece is a self-portrait or mirror for viewers navigating their own reorientation. Her art is a meditation on the fluid state of our individual realities. Consciously or subconsciously, we are all actively choosing how we exist in the world; our way of being is itself a choice.
The mountains she hikes, the plants in her immediate neighborhood, and the varieties of Southern California landscape all inform her imagery. Patterns, organic shapes, and vibrant colors found in aerial photography, molecular, or geological structures are also sources of inspiration. Forms curve, overlap, and transform as they take shape, echoing the same accumulation and response that drive her personal growth. Fascinated by nature's strength, resilience, and defiance, Tompkins expresses the potentials of reflection to build towards healing and renewal. The work is sometimes pure abstraction, but always carries the trace of a landscape: a mountain range, a cloud formation, a portal opening onto something else, another individual reality coming into form.
Originally from New Jersey, Tompkins has lived and worked in Los Angeles for the past 25 years. She holds a BFA from Manhattanville University and further studied art and art history at UCLA. Recent exhibitions include group shows at TAG of Los Angeles, Drawing Rooms Gallery of Jersey City, New Jersey, and the Nan Rae Gallery at Woodbury University. In 2023, she completed a public art commission for the City of Burbank, Let Dreams Take Flight. In 2025, she received a Center for Cultural Innovation Development Grant supporting her development. From 2025-2026, she participated in Shoebox Projects Call & Response, a four month long collaborative art book project, which culminated in a 2026 exhibition at the StartUp Art Fair in Venice, CA. Her art world influences include Abstract Expressionists such as Lee Krasner, the later works of Frank Stella, and her mentor, New York artist Randy Williams.