Collection: Suzette MacSkimming

SUZETTE DE LEY MACSKIMMING

Suzette De Ley MacSkimming is a painter and printmaker who lives and works in Perth, having previously lived in California, Toronto, Spain and Ottawa. Her vibrant acrylic paintings, monoprints and mixed-media works evoke the exhilaration of responding to inner and outer landscapes. Her art process values the spontaneous and intuitive. She explores, experiments with and celebrates the cycles of nature – growth, decay and regeneration – through the lens of abstraction.

“Making art is the culmination of my experiences and concerns at any given moment,” she
states. “Each work is something I have thought about, re-explored and lived through over time. The images and symbols are personal, stemming from my observations, my encounters and meaningful events in my life.”

A fine arts graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, MacSkimming studied with many leading west-coast abstract expressionists. As an honours graduate student she studied printmaking with Karl Kasten. After a year travelling in Europe she moved to Canada, studying with Robert Markle and Dennis Burton at the Three Schools of Art in Toronto, and with Richard Gorman and Leonard Gherbrandt at the Ottawa School of Art.

MacSkimming has worked in residence at the Contemporary Artists’ Center in North Adams, Massachusetts, where she produced and exhibited a series of large monoprints. In 2007 fifteen works from that series were purchased by and are permanently displayed at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University, Ottawa.

MacSkimming was a co-finalist for the MERA Award of Excellence in Fine Arts and Crafts in
2012. She was an adjudicator for the 2022 and 2024 MERA awards. She has exhibited widely in Ottawa, Toronto, Kingston, and North Adams and is represented in private and business collections in Canada, the U.S. and abroad.