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High School, which is on Charlton Street. So, it’s been a very Greenwich Village- heavy life
(laughs).
My whole family on my mother’s side is fairly artistic… well, both sides. My mother
was a dancer and then she was a fashion designer and she also liked to paint and sculpt. My
grandfather, on my father’s side, was a painter. And his brother, like my grand uncle was a
sculptor, so there’s a lot of artists on both sides, yeah. I wouldn’t say they influenced me in the
sense of ‘oh Suzy, you should do this’. But they definitely exposed me to it from the time I was
born, basically. And it was always um, you know, judged as okay. Like, I’ve met people who
knew they wanted to be an artist and their family was like ‘no you should be a doctor or a lawyer
or something’. In my family, being an artist was always acceptable. I guess they just had a kind
of a natural acceptance and respect for it, yeah.
I’ve done art pretty much all my life. Well, as a little girl, I always drew pictures and I
loved to make things like, I dunno, make things out of paper, make dolls, [and] sew. My mother
[and] my grandmother both knew how to sew, so they taught me. I did take a little ceramics class
when I was like 5 years old, like a mommy and me class. My mother and I went and I, y’know,
made hand prints in clay. I have little horse heads that I’ve made (laughs). But mostly I was
drawing and painting. And then in high school, I took drawing and painting classes like fine art
classes after school with this particular woman. Her name was Gladys Schwartz. Gladys was an
oil painter and would teach kids in her apartment, I guess to make some extra money. I was like
15 when I started. She taught me a lot. We learned some very traditional techniques; we learned
pen and ink and drawing, watercolor [and] oil painting. I thought I wanted to be an illustrator but
turned out I didn’t (laughs). So yeah, I did drawing and painting and then it was through my