Susan Litsios died in Baulmes, Switzerland, in November 2017. Her studio is still packed with books and art works, so if you are interested in learning more please use the contact form.

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I was born in Philadelphia,PA in 1937. My childhood was spent in Plainfield, N.J. where my parents ran a used book shop, which explains why my early influences were all children’s book illustrators- Arthur Rackham, Ernest H.Shepard, C.W.Wyeth. After high school I went to the Cooper Union Art School, in New York City, as a Fine Arts major. I graduated in 1957 and then married Socrates Litsios, also an alumnus of Cooper, but from the Engineering School. In the next eleven years, we had six children, which was pretty much the limit of my creativity for those years.

By the time the last baby was born, we were living in Geneva, where my husband had accepted a job at the World Health Organization.

In 1974, when the youngest child started school, I began to draw again in a disciplined way, every day, and to make woodcuts, printing with a spoon. Soon, I began making prints in the afternoons at the Centre de Gravure nearby in Geneva. In 1976, a woodcut was accepted in an international print show. It had been my first try, and encouraged me quite a lot.

In 1982, we moved to Baulmes, a village at the foot of the Jura mountains. The forest rises behind us and the plain below is farmland and woods, not to mention the stream that runs down beside the house- all are endless sources of subject matter. My studio is on the ground floor of an old mill-house, arranged around a rather primitive press.

Although the woodcuts dominate, I also work at monotypes and little illustrated handmade books.

When commercial inks for color started depending on pthalo green and blue and synthetic red and yellow I began to fabricate my own inks from traditional pigments. You really can’t imitate the cobalts or cadmiums, for example. The color prints are always by reduction; all the colors are printed from the same block. I work on pearwood, cherry, elm, and endgrain. Editions are small, usually 20 in black and white and up to 30 in color, and always printed on the most beautiful papers I can find.
The work is instinctual, although intellectually I watch what I’m doing. I often feel as though some other force is working through me. I’ve learned to stop when it’s not going well and let my subconscious salve the problem overnight. I don’t draw very much on the block and start to proof print as soon as I can see that something is happening; the wood often has a lot to say, and it seems only sensible to listen to it.

Susan Litsios