Medium: Acrylic

I paint & create for fun and I love color so I guess the word “playful” comes to mind.

“I’m a bit of a Nomad Artist who grew up in the UK and spent a couple of years in Norway before moving to Albuquerque, San Diego, Pasadena and then settling in Seattle. Now I’ve returned to Southern California to paint and create my experiences of traveling the world and exploring other fascinating cultures. I love color and patterns and using my imagination to create my art. I use all kinds of medium but mostly acrylics and lots of intuition.”

I love Escondido. It inspires me. It is where I was born at Palomar Hospital right up the street. Cruisin’ Grand takes place just a couple of blocks from where I was born and as far as Grand Avenue is concerned, it is my most favorite memory of the downtown area.

My hope is that people will ride by, see the artwork and park their cars to take a picture in front of it.

This mural is my gift to the city. It’s my way to give back to the community and say thank you.

Influenced by music and art woven into the fabric of my life, I decided to do a new interpretation of the logo for MAGEC (Museums and Arts Growing Escondido Culture) and adapted it to reflect some of the Escondido “MAGEC” that permeates our Downtown area on so many special occasions throughout the year: a parade of musical instruments with Escondido leading the way!
Art enriches our lives and our world. It is an exceptional honor for me to share my art, my vision, and my dream with the community and with art enthusiasts overall. For me, “Escondido Leads the Way!

If you ask me where I’m from, I will still say Brooklyn, but Escondido is definitely my home!

She has welcomed me like family and inspiring me she motivates me to paint.

When I paint, I look for the real person while communicating with the subject.

I like to see the subject in a real space with everything moving and alive, not like some frozen mannequin. By talking to them I can find their true character.

So, I like to connect at a deeper level with each person.

When painting Plein Air, it’s a direct approach and you capture a moment in time.

With my portrait paintings each day we are different dependent on our life conditions. And even light is never the same. Colors change from morning to night. So, if I paint the same subject ten times, I always see something distinct. This then creates difficulty for me, never totally satisfied. I want the portrait to be the best of the best. I look for which face is really Suzanne. I painted her portrait over several days. Each time, Suzanne would say it is perfect just the way it is. She did not want me to touch it. But then on every occasion she amazed me, and I found her expression better than yesterday.

The most important part from the beginning was that we were in synch with each other in that she inspires me as I inspire her. There is an energy exchange.

I don’t mean to change the portrait, but people watching, including me, realize afterwards that the portrait changed already. In the end I make it stronger, adding more character with a stronger representation. It results in a greater realization that everything is changing all the time. I want to stop only when I capture the likeness of the person’s soul. That is bringing out the best in that person. Looking at the portrait they can say, “That is exactly me.” She feels what she sees in the image, and it makes her happy.

When I paint a portrait, I try to bring out the inner person. To relax, the subject can talk. I must really pay attention to see. I learned this skill doing portraits in Disneyland. People don’t sit still. I had to paint a lot of people walking all over. Often, they were not looking at me and maybe they would turn around. Those are the conditions I painted in. That is my skill. For me it is easier to determine the uniqueness when I look at different angles as the subject is moving around. You can see the many aspects of the person.

The title, Expression, is the manifestation of that resonance between me, the artist and my subject.

This image is something I created nearly 10 years ago as a smaller painting. I was going through a difficult transition in my life and was trying to process some of my emotions.

I often use art as my own personal therapy. For me it symbolized the inner turmoil and pain that I had felt while all these changes were happening. I revisited many of these same feelings this past year and I just felt it was appropriate to rework the painting and give it a new and hopeful slant.

Even though there is destruction and pain in it, there is also optimism, hope, and freedom. It is about transforming the grief and upheaval into something new.

I think a lot of people have been feeling something similar over the past year: The fear, the changes worldwide, the political climate, the loss of jobs, the loss of loved ones, the unknown future. It can feel like the end of the world! But even with all these ‘volcanic’ changes, we endure even though the terrain is different.

If we can awaken our minds to the idea that we can adapt and grow in this situation, then we can evolve into something stronger and more resilient personally and globally.

On a deeper level, the painting really is to remind me to stop and smell the roses; to appreciate the beauty in the little things, especially in the seasons of our lives when it seems like there is only darkness and “grim-ness”.

I hope when people look at this painting, they are reminded that there is beauty in every moment and situation, sometimes you just need to slow down and appreciate it.

Wanting my piece to stand out I used my top-quality high tech spray paint made for murals rather than brushing on the color with a paintbrush and painted something unexpected, something realistic that does not exist in real nature, such as brown roses.

I wanted my roses to look real yet not real, which is why the shape of the roses look true to life, but the color is not. I like using earth tones that I love which is why the roses are brown. At the same time, I like the classic look of brown roses with gold bees on them.
I love painting roses. I do a lot of paintings with a lot of color. And whenever I am painting outdoors it seems that bees always come around and lay on my work. Like Spiderman, a spider bite gave him his superpowers; the bees are the same. As they land on my paint, they become infected by the paint taking on the colors.

One could think of man interfering with nature in some ways and how that affects nature.
Now I incorporate bees in most of my paintings.

The roses are in different stages of transformation from a bud to fully open. It is a metaphor for my own journey as an artist going from my beginnings decades ago to my present day unfolding as an artist.

I want my mural to be very beautiful that people would want to take their picture in front of. In some ways I am offering a bouquet of flowers to the community I care about.

Suki Liebow is contemporary artist who uses multi-media art including paint, micrography (tiny writing), wire, enamel, pen and ink, plaster, and pencil sketching as a form of emotional movement and expression.

In Suki’s more than 20 years of research on the impacts of emotional trauma on human psychology and behavior, her primary focus has been on the successful integration of emotional processing as a key component of achieving productive communication and healthy relationships. Her artwork is often the outcome of her own emotional work.

Along with several other businesses, Suki Founded Suki Liebow Designs where she offers commissioned art and custom design work. She currently lives in Oceanside and is a Studio Artist at ArtHatch in Escondido.