Susan Bornstein died peacefully at the Ida Emmerson Hospice House in Eureka on May 5, 2025, at the age of 78.

She was born in Denver, Colorado on December 1, 1946, to Emanuel and Ann Bornstein. A few years later, the family, including Susan’s older sister Debrah, moved to Kansas City, Missouri where she grew up and graduated high school in 1964. During that period she discovered her love for and talent in the visual arts.

In 1969 she received her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis. After moving to Boston she earned a teaching credential in art education from Boston University and taught art in middle schools for two years in the Boston area. In 1975 she moved to Baltimore with her partner, Charles Chamberlin, and began studying at The Maryland Institute College of Art and working in the Goucher College art department. She completed her MFA in 1979 and started work at The Maryland Institute, supervising student art teachers in local schools.

Susan and Charles purchased a Baltimore row house together in 1978. Two years later they married, and the following year Susan gave birth to her daughter Sarah. In 1983, she moved with her family to Arcata for her husband to join the faculty of the then Humboldt State University. In 1985, Susan gave birth to her son Matthew, completing her family.

For over 55 years, Susan worked as a professional artist and art teacher in the Midwest and on both coasts. Since moving to Arcata, she showed her work in solo and group exhibits throughout Northern California, and her paintings are owned by private collectors throughout the United States. While she was a printmaker, she was active in the Ink People, finding a welcoming and vibrant art community there, and enjoying working with Inkers, including Brenda Tuxford and Libby Maynard. In 2003 she was one of the founding members of Arcata Artisans, a collective of artists who created a cooperative gallery in Arcata, where she remained active until her cancer forced her to step back. In 2008, Susan moved her studio from Eureka to the StewArt Studios in Arcata, joining a group of artists who share the basement of the old Stewart School and enjoying the community of artists there. She shared a studio with Patricia Sennett.

When Susan arrived in Arcata, her primary medium was printmaking and specifically monotypes, often with the addition of oil pastels and/or colored pencils. That evolved into painting directly on paper.

Susan said her work was based on what she saw in her own neighborhood, the gardens and yards of friends or other immediate and familiar locations. She took great pleasure in finding unexpected combinations of colors, textures, and shapes in her everyday experience of the world. She said that the artist’s role is to notice, to take the time to see, to feel, and to respond and that the ordinary experience can become something new and unique when processed through the artist’s sensibilities.

Susan wrote, “My art is interpretive rather than representational. I am pleased when my work evokes the feel or sense of a particular place, but I am not interested in rendering or documenting. What interests me is jumping off from that initial real place or point of departure and getting involved in the subjective, personal and expressive process of making art. Color is, perhaps, the most important expressive tool in my visual vocabulary.”

“Although landscape is the point of departure for my art, the real subject of my work is the process of finding a balance - a balance of color against color, shape against shape, mark against mark - and doing this with a personal gesture and energy.”

For her entire adult life, Susan was active both as a working artist and as a teacher of art. Her teaching experience ranged from working with the elderly, instructing college-level studio courses, teaching art in public junior high school, and doing hands-on printmaking presentations to kindergartners. She served as a guest artist under the California Arts Council Artists in Residence Program on three occasions (1989, 1990, 1991) at three different school sites. She also gave printmaking and mixed media presentations to adult artists and several other school groups including her own learning-handicapped daughter’s special education class.

She also served in the Artists in Schools program. She felt it offered a unique opportunity for her to interact with school-aged children in a mutually rewarding and enriching way. It was an opportunity for her to share with them her life as a working artist in their community, to share her artistic process and her personal way of looking at the familiar, immediate environment which we have in common. She felt that the students gave back to her their unique observations, their energy and excitement as they seek out their own personal images and solutions.

Susan is preceded in death by her parents Ann and Emanuel Bornstein and her younger sister Judy. She is survived by her husband Charles Chamberlin of Arcata, her daughter Sarah Chamberlin of Arcata, her son Matthew Chamberlin of Glendale, her sister Debrah Bokowski and brother-in-law Gary Bokowski of Portland, Oregon, and her nephew Aaron Bokowski of Portland, Oregon.

There will be a celebration of Susan’s life this summer.

In lieu of flowers, please spend time enjoying the artwork on your walls, in galleries, in museums, and in artists’ studios. If you find art that gives you joy, please buy it, if you can, and help support the artists. If you feel the urge to donate, please consider supporting the Ink People.

Farewell Susan. We will remember and miss your laugh, your smile and the joy you brought into every room. We will enjoy your art forever.

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The obituary above was submitted on behalf of Susan Bornstein’s loved ones. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here. Email news@lostcoastoutpost.com.