Susan Dory is a Seattle-based painter whose work inhabits the spaces between repetition, variation and the deep structure of form.

With a Bachelor of Arts from Iowa State University, she followed on-campus study with extensive independent travel through India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe—journeys that helped inform her palette, process and sense of interconnectedness.

Dory begins each painting without a fixed image in mind. Instead she works from a concept — often drawn from visual, cultural or metaphysical ideas — and then lets the painting evolve through a layered process. She applies acrylic paint (at a viscosity similar to house paint) flat onto the canvas, builds shape and pattern, then pours clear acrylic medium in between coats. Final works frequently exceed 15–20 layers.

Key to her approach is an interest in systems of interconnection — think of the metaphor of Indra’s Net: a vast web of jewels each reflecting all the others. In her work this notion emerges as subtle grids, networks of line, shape and chroma.

Color itself plays almost a character-role in Dory’s work. She understands color not as mere fill but as relational: adjacent hues shift, interact, dominate or recede depending on their neighbors. Her travel experiences—Mexico City’s saturated light, India’s textiles, the built systems of modern architecture—all feed into her chromatic choices.

Over more than two decades, Dory has exhibited widely: she has shown in solo presentations and group exhibitions across the United States, with galleries in Seattle, New York, Atlanta, and beyond.

Her work is included in public collections and commissions: among them the Tacoma Art Museum and institutional commissions through public-arts programs.

Through process-rich abstraction, Susan Dory invites the viewer into a space of layered meaning—where pattern suggests both order and flux, where color pulses, and where the quiet belief is that every element is connected to every other.