Cheryl Suitor has been an active member of the Loudoun Sketch Club since 2022. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in art education from The University of Maryland in 1984, and a Master’s degree from Towson State University in 1994.  Until her retirement in 2021, she was a dedicated, highly motivated and energetic elementary school art teacher for Loudoun County Public Schools for 36 years.

Cheryl has also taught adult beginner painting classes at local venues including Roer’s Zoo in Reston, Locust Hill Golf Course, Clarke County Recreation Center and Blue Ridge Wildlife Center. She has also been a volunteer ceramics teacher at the Loudoun Senior Center in Leesburg. 

Cheryl always painted on a part-time basis, but only when she retired from teaching did she have the opportunity to get serious about painting. She now paints full time, and her love of the outdoors has inspired her to paint a series of endangered animals to raise an awareness of their vulnerability and the need to protect them. Each work of art in the series is an original oil painting created in her home studio. She has exhibited in local galleries in Loudoun and Clarke Counties. She also accepts commissions of people and their pets.

Through her paintings, Cheryl strives to motivate others to feel the “absolute majesty and grandeur “ of our nation’s state, national parks, and rural habitats.  Her most recent landscape shown here, was painted in Loudoun County.    Cheryl admires the paintings of John Singer Sargent and Georgia O'Keeffe.  She likes Sargent’s command of brush strokes, color and shadows.   She also likes the way Georgia O’Keefe enlarged her subjects in her paintings.