Susan Amons

Susan Amons (b 1954) is a printmaker whose dreamy monoprints of beastly caribou, snowy owls, fearless crows, and long-legged birds, inhabit a world beyond real. Made from mylar shapes that she inks, prints, and re-inks, Amons builds layers of colors, sometimes repeated in ghostly re-strikes that contribute to the ephemerality of her work.

In a review of New Natural Histories, an exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art, Philip Isaacson said of Amons’ avian monoprints “Her great birds, trailed by the ghosts of a second pressing, move slowly across an embryonic landscape.”

“These are all major works by an artist with a singular and committed vision. . . .They begin where Audubon’s essays in the surreal leave off. . . . I also see Japanese screens and a lyricism that I can’t assign to anyone else. . . . In Amons’ most fully realized works, the result is bewitching.” — Philip Isaacson, Maine Sunday Telegram

Amons, who uses monotype, drypoint, and Chine-collé, developed her unique combination of printmaking techniques while on fellowships at the Women’s Studio Workshop in New York, and the Heliker- LaHotan Foundation on Great Cranberry Isle in Maine, where she developed her Cranberry Island series.

Amons has been the recipient of numerous awards grants, fellowships, and Maine Percent for Art Commissions. Her work has been exhibited widely in countless solo and group exhibitions, and is in numerous private and public collections, including the New York Public Library, the University of New England,  the Farnsworth Art Museum, and the Portland Museum of Art, and the art museums at Colby, Bates and Bowdoin colleges among.