Susan Ross (artist)

Susan Andrina Ross CM, (3 June 1915 – 5 January 2006), was a printmaker, illustrator and painter from Port Arthur, Ontario who is best known for her portraits of Native and Inuit peoples. Her work is valuable both for its artistry and for its historical significance since she captured many images of a passing way of life. In 2002 she was awarded the Order of Canada in the Visual Arts.

Susan Ross was one of four girls born to Colonel and Mrs. Harry Ruttan in Port Arthur Ontario. Ross showed an interest in drawing at a very young age and was encouraged by her mother to take art lessons. Her art education continued through high school where Ross began studying anatomy. An important and early influence in her life was her uncle, the documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, who is best known for his film Nanook of the North. Flaherty offered Ross an example of a person who was well traveled and had lived with, and documented the lifestyle of, the Inuit people. Flaherty also provided Ross with the means to attend the Ontario College of Art in Toronto in 1933. In 1938, in the last term of her fourth year, Ross left before graduating to marry Jim Ross, a Port Arthur lawyer, and later a judge, with whom she eventually had four children.

Ross returned to Port Arthur to begin a family and also to continue with her art work. Painting in the 1940s and 1950s at Lake Superior, Rossport, and Whitefish lake, Ross strove to be taken seriously as an artist. She signed her work "S.A. Ross" or "SARoss" because "women did not have any clout". Ross was active in the Port Arthur Art Club which held exhibitions and juried shows at the local library, there being no public art gallery there at the time. From 1951 to 1952, Ross taught art at Hillcrest High School. Ross experimented with new techniques, textural effects, such as scraping-out or using tissue and glue, and mixing layers of watercolor paint between printed layers in etchings. As such her work contributed to the shift to modernism that was taking place in Canada. Although Ross never abandoned figurative representations, her rationalized and planar compositions hint at the influence of cubism.

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