Sadness trembled in the Earth and its animals, not in people alone, when Susan Hertel crossed over the river. Back and forth she went in life - the hillside, a horse, a dog in a sunlit room - saying in conversation, in paintings, in letters, and poems, Here this line, this hue, this moment, it's all the sign one needs against the dark. She saw, and she handed on lovingly the seeds she found.

- Barry Lopez

When I was a little girl
I would wander out of the swarm
of people of the Pueblo.
I would go into the hills,
by the stream,
and be with the rocks and birds.
I would talk with me, with them,
while I got dizzy off the moving light
on the flowing water.
I laughed and ran with the wind
Blowing the flags of grass.
I loved that world,   I still do.

Years passed and I met another
who felt the same—someone with
the feeling of the hills, of the stream,
of the rocks.
She was there with light in her face,
with shadows in her hair,
with waves of flowing time in her being.
We hugged
and I looked into the wells of her eyes...
it was familiar
like a sister without explanations.

No explanations...but...

It is there in the smile
that forms in her being
and breaks like the sun... on her face.
It is encircling strength and beauty
when I can feel that smile
forming on my own face.
It is again the flowing
in and around
the hills, rocks, streams
into timelessness
where
I am her and she is me.

-Rina Swentzell

   Sue Hertel is dead at age 63. I first met Sue 40 years ago. I was a sophomore at Pomona College, doing my art classes at Scripps College. I never met her formally. No one ever introduced us. She was already established on the premises. I was an invisible undergrad, just another art student. Only as I began to assert myself as a “serious” art student did Sue begin to recognize me as a person. That doesn’t mean that she ever acknowledged my presence or that we became friends. She was 4 years older and light-years wiser.

In those days, Sue was a rather formidable young woman. She was a no-nonsense, serious artist. This was 1953, years before Women’s Lib or the Feminist movement. Sue was way ahead of her time. She was special. She was more than willing to compete against the boys. Because of her talent and commitment, her passionate commitment to art, she established herself as an artist. She could draw and she could paint and she never wavered.

In the 40 years I knew her she never wavered. Sue never cared that art was male-dominated. She saw that there was room for exceptional talents like Mary Cassatt and Suzanne Veladon. And over the years as she matured as an artist, she became one of the very best of her generation. She was a class act. There was something patrician about her, innately aristocratic. She held her head high. I think that she was truly proud of herself, of what she had accomplished. Most of all, most important of all for the artist, she knew her work was special.

As a young artist, I had two role models there at Scripps. One was Jack Zajac and the other was Sue. From them I learned that to be a real artist meant to do real work, to be totally committed, to never look back. That’s the way we were then. That’s the way we kept on being.

The young Sue was striking in appearance with fine features and raven black hair. She was beautiful because of an inner radiance. She radiated conviction and integrity. Her work was inviolate. Throughout the 4 decades that I knew her and saw her as an assistant to Millard Sheets, as a wife and mother, as an exhibiting artist, as a resident of Claremont, Glendora, and New Mexico, her artwork was a constant. It will remain as an enduring monument to her unwavering vision. She painted all the things she loved and cared about. She lived a full life, a rich and rewarding life. I will miss her and I will always respect her for who she was and for what she was: a very fine person and a very fine artist.

- James Strombotne

“Yes,” she said, “when the Gulf war started,
I felt as though someone had kicked a hole
In my immune system.”

Then the same old long-defeated
cancer jumped out from behind the door, and went
for her lungs.   No more years
to paint, to watch her horses and her young apple trees,
her little, lonely house made of earth, her dogs
and cats, the serrated blue lines
of the hills, the space, the light, the clouds, the bones
in the wash that seemed to be hallucinatory
wings, the shapes of unconditioned angels.

It was time then
to leave the low, clear light still shining
through the mare’s white tail as it streamed
like cirrus, and the shapes, the entrancing shapes
and colors of everything, the mysterious, holy way
they all made patterns together: the studio door,
her visiting daughter’s neon-colored shoes, the creosote bush,
the stars, the falling snow, the gate in the fence, the belly
of her black horse, the rumpled bed covers; even as they shifted
in their endless dance.

She loved them all,
and human beings too, if they would only
keep back a little, give her the room she needed,
the wordlessness, spare her their clamor, leave her
to praise, work, be, to use her full powers
in the paintings, each a strong attempt to do something
never quite possible, to hold quiet, to make visible
the moving, invisible breath; that breath
in which she could often sense her spirit quivering
like a mote of dust; the immense, living soul
that she could feel within and without – that welled up
inside her – that carried her – that breathed her –

that breathes her still.

- Kate Barnes