Susan Fox was born in Los Angeles in 1953, but her parents moved to the northern California coastal town of Eureka in 1955. Drawing and reading were her two favorite activities as a child. Her first artistic triumph at around age nine was placing second in a contest sponsored by a local shoe store which required the entrants to draw a cartoon character wearing Keds sneakers. She drew Pepi LePew wearing bright red ones. The first prize was a live skunk, which she desperately wanted. Second prize was a canvas trampoline. Her first life lesson in being gracious in defeat came when her mom took her to the store to collect her prize and she had to smile and act happy about receiving a prize for which she could have cared less.

Her first art lessons at age eleven were through the Redwood Art Association on Saturday mornings. They were held on the ground floor of a very large and otherwise empty gingerbread Victorian. She worked in a brand new media, acrylics, often with a palette knife. She had already been drawing, though, since she was old enough to hold a pencil. More often than not, the subject was animals.

Susan attended College of the Redwoods (A.A.-1974) and Humboldt State University, taking a variety of art classes at both schools.

She got her first job in an art-related field in 1976 when she became an apprentice at a local sign shop. She worked there for five years, learning the sign trade and graphic design. She also became an expert at posthole digging, running power tools, setting up 20 ft. extension ladders and planks and driving a dark blue 1956 Ford pickup truck.

After a move to Napa and then Berkeley, Susan worked as a freelance graphic designer for a variety of clients, including a natural foods store, a brew pub, an oriental rug retailer and a video rental outlet.

She went back to school in 1987 and majored in illustration at the Academy of Art College (now University) in San Francisco. Her courses included up to nine hours of drawing a week plus doing a finished illustration. Susan received her BFA Illustration degree in 1989.

She attended a summer art class at Christchurch College, Oxford University for three weeks in the summer of 1989. Days were spent out on Tom Quad or in the cloisters working on various projects. One day the class was allowed into the Master's Garden to sketch and paint the gate that Alice used to go down the rabbit hole and the tree in which she saw the Cheshire Cat. (Lewis Carroll taught at Christ Church and used different bits for settings in his classic story, Alice in Wonderland.) On Sunday evenings she could sit in her room in a dormitory building designed by John Ruskin and listen as, one after another, the bells of the various Colleges pealed out on the  summer air.

In early 1990, she moved back to Eureka and spent the next few years doing freelance design and illustration for local and national clients. For a short time, she combined her studio with running a gallery filled with art created by her friends and acquaintances.

Starting in 1995, she studied traditional oil painting for over two years with a local instructor. Since then, Susan has had a number of one person shows and has participated in many group shows in Humboldt County, along with a number of national juried shows.

She enjoys traveling and over the years has been to Japan, Mongolia, Kenya, England, Germany, Sweden, France, Italy, Portugal and Canada.

In January of 1999, Susan spent three weeks in Kenya at a tented camp and on an Earthwatch project studying Lake Naivasha. In October of 2004, Susan went back to Kenya on an artist workshop safari with the late Simon Combes.

In April/May of 2005, Susan went to Mongolia on another Earthwatch project, Mongolian Argali. She also visited a national park where takhi (Przewalski’s horse) have been reintroduced. In the  fall of 2006, Susan traveled back to Mongolia for three weeks. She went to Hustai and the nature reserve where she participated in the Earthwatch project again to see them at a different time of year. New destinations included the Gobi Desert and the newest takhi release site in western Mongolia.

Photos of both Kenyan trips and her journeys to Mongolia can be viewed in the But Wait! There's More... section of her website, along with a journal from the 1999 trip and an article on her first experience in Mongolia. There are also photos with commentary from both trips there.

Her USA travels have included Montana, Wyoming, Florida, Ohio, West Virginia, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Hawaii.

Susan and her husband, collie and four cats live on the coast of Northern California in a pleasant rural area called Dow's Prairie, twenty minutes from Redwood national Park and about five minutes from the beach.