About Artist
Susan K. D'Alessio working in her studio in the East Falls section of Philadelphia
Susan has been an artist her whole life.
Upon completing a successful 35-year career as a jewelry designer and goldsmith, she entered the Certificate Program of The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) to study painting. After graduating from PAFA in 2012, she began exhibiting her work at the yearly Philadelphia Open Studio Tours (POST) and at the Cerulean Arts Collective in Philadelphia where she is currently a member.
Inspired by the work of Abstract Expressionists, much of her work is abstract without identifiable imagery but dealing instead with relationships of color and shape. For several years she worked with fabric collage combining it with acrylics on larger canvases as well as more intimate works on paper.
Susan often creates works in a series. The Tom's Fire paintings of 2017 are a memorial to her brother, Tom Klein. The 2018 series of fabric collages Arleen’s Colors are a tribute to the creative quilt making career of her friend, Arleen Weinstein. More recently, her work has been inspired by the political and societal events that have been taking place in our country.
Since giving up her studio in the East Falls section of Philadelphia in 2022, Susan has been painting plein aire in watercolors, a medium that she first explored as an undergraduate at Grinnell College in Iowa. The houses and stores in her neighborhood in South Philadelphia have provided her with endless subject matter.