Susan Seddon Boulet, a San Francisco Bay Area artist, died at her home in Oakland on April 28,1997. She left behind many mourners including her son Eric, brothers Patrick and Ernani and her second mother Naide.
Susan Eleanor Seddon was born in Brazil in 1941. Her father, Eric Seddon, was the manager of a large farm in the interior of Brazil. In South Africa he was hired to work in Brazil, as a citrus expert. He also brought to Brazil a love of cattle that he used to eventually create a new breed of cattle. He returned to South Africa to marry and he brought her back to Brazil after the ceremony. Susan's mother, Eleanor Francis Seddon, died soon after her second child, Patrick, was born. Susan was two. Both her parents were immigrants from South Africa and so, at first, English was spoken at home.
Susan remembered her mother mostly in positive shadowy images and feelings, it was her father who had the most influence over her. She was educated first on the company farm and then later at St. George's, an English boarding school in Sao Paulo. Art was an integral part of her life but not the main focus until later in life. Her early work includes some detailed ink sketches, oil portraits and pencil drawings.
She was very religious as a child and at one point contemplated becoming a nun. Her father would not tolerate that, however, and sent her to finishing school in Switzerland. Her first job when she came back from Switzerland was teaching kindergarten at St. Paul's, another English school in Sao Paulo. Eric Seddon turned pioneer himself when he bought a large farm, about 14,000 acres, in Goias. Unfortunately he ran out of working capital and had to sell that spread moving to a smaller place over the border from Mato Grosso (in Paraguay). The family eventually settled down on a small sitio near Itapeva in the state of Sao Paulo. This intoxicating mix of countries and cultures made Susan trilingual, a sophisticated world traveler, well educated and culturally able to integrate almost anywhere.
She taught at St. Paul's and worked for a while at Braniff airlines becoming a very glamorous Miss Braniff at one point, complete with bouffant hairdo, costume and heels. She went to visit her brother Patrick when he was living in Berkeley with two other friends, Larry Boulet and Pat Harper. These young men were all at Yuba College together and then went on to Berkeley. Patrick says when he first met him Larry "he had a full time job as a cryptology maintenance technician in the Air Force, was taking a full load of courses at Yuba college, took care of the physics lab for our professor and raced his old MG in all the rallies in the neighboring areas and did all the maintenance on his car himself, including rebuilding the engine." He was also popular with the ladies and Patrick was wary when Susan began to date Larry.
However Susan moved forward with all the force in her convictions and in 1967 she married Lawrence Boulet and moved to University Village in Berkeley. Larry continued his engineering to start with, but then changed to French finally finishing his degree in entomology. He continued to grad school and got an MBA. Shortly after their son Eric was born the family moved to Oakland. He was known to pay attention to detail and was intense about all his projects.
Around the time he found out he had Hodgkins he started to learn to fly. Patrick and Larry flew to Brazil together in a tiny plane and had good fun along the way. Patrick remembers his devil will care attitude about flying which was quite unlike his careful attitude towards sailing. At one point "We hit a huge storm off the island of Martinique ,and he got most upset at me when I told him to turn back. He wanted to go right ahead into it. Neither of us of course had training to fly on instruments."
Larry was responsible for the idea of home shows for Susan's work and supported her in many ways, including making frames for her art and photographing them. He dies cancer in 1980 leaving Susan to cope with the practical side, his former role, of life on her own. She found it a hard lesson at first but managed to work out her roles as mother, financial boss, artist and (to many people) heroine very well.
Her art touched people in a profound way. Her early work was clearly a light hearted and simpler approach to content than later work. It was almost medieval in quality with golden clothed maidens, prancing unicorns, bearded Merlins and many a strange beastie appearing in rainbow bright colors. She tried lithography, pen and ink, colored pencil but eventually settled on oil pastel as being her favorite medium. This gave her the flexibility to layer one color on another and to reveal images beneath the obvious exterior. There is a fairy tale quality to her work, a sentimental recalling of childhood dreams of fairies and castles and most of all magic.
She studied as many aspects of her art as she could. She read, listened and talked about the obvious influences on her work - Greek myths, Jungian archetypes and cross cultural symbols - but what about the non-obvious areas of research? She was also interested in the roots of words and phrases, where they came from and how they got into the English language in the first place. She loved other cultures spiritual traditions and customs. She investigated the link with South Africa and the wider area of Africa. She learned about the shamans of Lapland and America. All that she heard was worked on and processed into images that appeared, as if by magic, on the blank sheets of art board she used so often.
Her art is found in printed form all over the world. Published works include the book Shaman: The Paintings of Susan Seddon Boulet printed in 1989. n 1994 Pomegranate published another collection of images in The Goddess Paintings.
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