Washougal Studio Artists Tour offers inside look at creative spaces this weekend

Washougal artist Suzanne Grover’s life changed on Feb 28, 2021. 

That was the day her doctors told Grover she had stage-four small-cell lung cancer. 

The diagnosis came as a shock to Grover, a lifelong nonsmoker, but she refused to think of the news as a death sentence. 

Instead, Grover went to her radiation appointments strengthened by three things: her faith; an outpouring of support from friends and family members; and her passion for art. 

“Art was a litmus for how I was feeling,” the Washougal resident and lifelong artist said. “As I started to get stronger, I started to do more art. Then it became, obviously, a therapy, too. I started glomming onto opportunities to do something creative at least every day. It was always kind of a dark day when I wasn’t able to. It gave me something familiar to turn to, something positive and optimistic that could make me say, ‘I can get through this.’”

Today, Grover said she feels “almost normal.” She is creating artworks nearly every day and is in the process of expanding the Washougal studio, SStudio C, she shares with her sister, Charlene Hale. 

This week, Grover is looking forward to participating as a featured artist in the annual Washougal Studio Artists Tour.

The tour, which invites members of the public into artists’ studios to better understand local artists’ creative process, will be held this weekend, from from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, May 7-8, at nine studio locations in Washougal.

“I’ve been involved in (the tour) from the very beginning, and just to see the different faces come through is pretty amazing,” Grover said. “You always find your friends who come through, but it’s nice to have new people that don’t know you come to your studio and ask questions and get to know you. My studio is evolving right now, so it’s not a solid space yet, but I hope to have a space that’s nice and comfortable in the next year.”

Grover is a multimedia artist, currently working with pastel, acrylic and watercolor. She mostly draws pictures of wildlife and paints portraits of horses and pets. 

“I have a strong connection with animals — I’m most attracted to the majesty and power of the horse,” she wrote on the Washougal Studio Artists Tour website. “And even when in a relaxed state, cats exude an electricity that pulls me in like a tractor beam. The eyes are the most critical to perfect to show if it’s a lazy, chill moment, or a fight-or-flight one.” 

“Pet portraits are a challenge, especially to get the expression just right. I did a portrait for my best friend, Nancy. Her black cat, Snowball, was painted on black paper with just the highlights of his shiny coat faintly showing, but his dancing eyes leap from the page.”

Grover also sells photo cards of several of her pieces. And when she wants to play with a lot of color, she creates acrylic pour paintings, paint jewelry, bookmarks and ornaments. 

“I love the feeling of bringing a pet’s life to paper with chalk,” she said. “It’s really been great to refine that to a level of realism where people look at (a piece of my art) and do a double-take or triple-take to see if it’s a photograph or not. That’s a compliment, it really is. It’s been fun to see my own work advance and to see peoples’ reactions to it, especially when they get their own pet in a portrait. It’s pretty fun. I never worked with pastels when I was a young student artist — I worked with watercolors and acrylics. I didn’t know how precise I could be with pastel until I really started to work with it, and it’s amazing how much detail you can put into a painting with just chalk.”

Grover started drawing pictures of horses when she was a young girl, partly inspired by her grandmother, an oil painter. She took art classes in high school and entered college as an graphics art major, but “didn’t click” with the subject and moved on to landscape architecture.

She set her art aside until 2007, when her mother invited her to go to an acrylic art class. After that she “started painting all the time.”

Grover said that she feels “really blessed” that her healing from cancer has gone so well over the past year. 

“I definitely feel better than I was just before I got diagnosed because I was really sick for a while before I went to the doctor,” she said. “I feel almost like I did before I got really sick, so that’s a really good sign. Every once in a while, I have a little hitch in my giddyup, but I’ve really gotten a lot stronger lately. I just had a PET scan (last month), so I’m pretty optimistic that the cancer is at or near downgraded to ‘disease.’”

Nowadays, Grover is again thinking about ways she can expand her artistic repertoire. 

“I have a pattern for a three-dimensional papier-mache horse that I’m interested in building and painting, so I’d like to move into that realm,” she said. “I want to try something new. I still have designs someday to paint on a big scale, and I don’t know if that means oil or acrylic, or even maybe getting into murals down the road. But not too soon. That’s a ways off for me, but that is an interest. I’m looking forward to not stopping where I am now, but continuing to advance and move into different areas where I can grow my art.”

Grover’s work can be viewed online at sstudioc.art and in person during this weekend’s studio artists tour.