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Susan Dahlin is The Village Gallery’s guest artist for March.  


Judy Wayland, Gallery spokesperson announces that a reception for Susan will be held on Saturday, March 3rd, from 2-5pm.  A featured artist in “Our State” magazine, (http://www.ourstate.com/susan-dahlin/) Susan’s work was inspired by her father, a portrait artist.  Strong-willed, eccentric, and an immigrant from Norway, Finn Dahlin nurtured his daughter. Many times, Dahlin saw Finn, knife in hand, scraping away what he didn’t like from a carefully planned composition. 

Unlike her father, Dahlin intended to become a painter. But after studying fine arts for two years at Penn State University, she switched to broadcasting. During her 20-year career as a television host and executive producer at WRAL-TV in Raleigh, painting remained an avocation. Today, she paints.

Dahlin dislikes brushes; their constraints prompted her to experiment with her father’s knives. She uses them to apply paint to board or canvas. From the first, she loved the freedom the knives gave her. They let her push paint around, explore, and blend colors applied directly from tubes of the vibrant Charvin oils from Paris. 

After Dahlin and her husband bought a log house high on an Ashe County mountainside a few years ago, she began dividing her time between the cabin and her home in Raleigh. But she spends most nights in the mountains, palette knife in hand, working at one of the easels she retrieved from her father’s studio. As each painting nears completion, she pulls out one of her father’s old tubes and applies a little color from it. It’s a way, she says, “to stick a little bit of Dad in every painting.”