Susanne ‘Suzy’ Spencer

Susanne “Suzy” Spencer passed from this life on August 27, 2023. Those who held her dear need only glance at a marsh-side landscape or a portrait of a cat basking in sunlight to remember her.

Throughout her life she was an artist, educator, environmentalist and traveler. But perhaps she’s best known and loved for her “unsung hero” roles as a loving daughter, sister, aunt, teacher and friend. Suzy helped care for her younger brothers in her youth, later helping her sister and brothers raise their children.

Devoted nieces and nephews describe Aunt Suzy as a surrogate parent. She also built many friendships in the towns and cities where her career and artistic whims helped her weave a life. And the many who knew Suzy would say that Parkinson’s disease, which she lived with for 30 years, didn’t dim her sense of vision or artistry. A shaky hand, it appears, can still create fine art and gently guide a student.

Born in Bellefonte, Penn., in 1940, Susanne was the second of five children to an engineer father and a homemaker mother who later became a notable author. Her father’s job required regular relocation, and the family moved from Pennsylvania to Arkansas, then Alabama and Florida before work took him to West Africa. Suzy and her older sister were in high school when he took a job leading a mining operation in Sierra Leone, so Suzy and her sister moved in with their grandmother in Northport, Ala., to finish high school and attend college at the University of Alabama, across the river in Tuscaloosa, where Suzy earned a degree in French.

Art, education and travel were strong threads in the fabric of Suzy’s life. Childhood lessons in art taught by a family friend in Keystone Heights, Fla., germinated into a lifelong passion. In the early 1950s, the Spencer family moved to what would become the family’s creek-side homestead in the woods north of Jacksonville. Oak hammocks, marshes and the animals (wild and family) became a theme for much of Suzy’s early work. And though Suzy traveled extensively — and lived much of her life in Georgia and in and around Washington, D.C. — the homestead, “Bugtussle,” would draw Suzy home through her life.

After graduating, Suzy followed her parents to Sierra Leone where she taught school. Upon returning to the United States, she decided teaching would be a good career. Her brother, Rob, recalls visiting Suzy in his youth. His sister took him on a tour of the Dallas school where Suzy worked with students who had emotional needs. Meeting some of her students, he was struck by Suzy’s “wonderful gift of being able to work with children, inspiring and educating them despite any emotional disabilities they suffered.”

Suzy continued to teach and went on to get her master’s in special education as well as certificates in art education. Suzy taught in the public-school systems of Washington, D.C., Savannah, Ga., and Jacksonville, Fla.

While in Washington, Suzy studied drawing and design at the Corcoran School of Art. Oil, acrylic and watercolor were some of her mediums. A lesson in batik from a friend launched a two-year study in the artform. Suzy admired old masters and impressionists and dabbled in styles from classical to abstract. And passions for both art nouveau and Tiffany windows took her on pilgrimages across the United States and Europe. Suzy was on one such pilgrimage in Vienna when she received her diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. The news only made her more determined to travel and create. Thinking back on Suzy’s travels through life, her oldest sibling, Lolly, smiled and said, “She left a trail of suitors in her wake. She was beautiful, smart and interesting.”

Suzy shared her gift of teaching and painting with family and friends. “Aunt Suzy would arrange still-lifes and teach me to ‘see’ light and shadow as she helped me learn to draw,” said Glenn Martin, one of Suzy’s nine nephews and nieces. “And she passed that interest on to my sons. Aunt Suzy was at her best when guiding and creating with children.”

An environmentalist and animal lover, Suzy is captured on film cuddling a leopard cub, a bush baby, a mongoose and a chimpanzee (fortunately, not all at once) when in West Africa. The leopard might have been her inspiration for a favored muse later in life: Paintings of Miss Kitty, a calico, grace many of the family dens. Her nieces Anne Holt and Susan Akpinar shared that Aunt Suzy’s love for small creatures was one of her endearing qualities, and they knew that her vote could be relied upon in the “please, can we keep it” negotiations.

After retiring in 2000, Suzy moved to Shepherdstown, W.Va., where she was a fixture in the town’s vibrant art scene, drawing and painting with friends in the Friday Painters group. Despite Parkinson’s disease, Suzy kept traveling to those beautiful gardens and landscapes of the Impressionists she loved. Many remember Suzy’s adventures in France where she rented a house near Bergerac. She opened it to any who wanted to join her, and dozens came.

With the crippling progression of Parkinson’s, Suzy lived with her sister and brother-in-law, Lolly and Tommy Martin, in both Shepherdstown and then in Cheraw, S.C. As her symptoms worsened, Suzy moved back to the state that first inspired her, Florida. There, in Jacksonville, she could be near her younger brothers Tom and Rob, sister-in-law Pamela Spencer, and their children. Even in assisted care, Suzy continued to paint and teach art and enjoyed frequent visits to Bugtussle. There she enjoyed reminiscing, laughing with family and friends about the silly stuff in life. Her brother Tom curated a lovely gallery in his home where Suzy delighted in critiquing her work.

Suzy Spencer is preceded in death by parents Robert Victor Spencer and Sue McDaniel Spencer, and brother John R. Spencer. Suzy leaves her sister Laura “Lolly” Martin, and brothers Thomas W. Spencer, and Robert H.B. Spencer, along with many nieces and nephews, great nieces and nephews, and more friends than can be counted.