For the past six years, Susan Greenleaf has lived in the town of Bishop, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. There she enjoys gardening, hiking, rock climbing, bicycling, kayaking, swimming, and being an all-around naturalist.
She earns her living as a freelance illustrator. Her primary client is the Stave Company, a Vermont-based enterprise that makes hand-cut wooden jigsaw puzzles. Susan paints and designs the puzzles — “a challenging design job” — which involve small, interlocking shapes.
She took a circuitous route before settling down in Bishop. Growing up primarily in Palo Alto, where her father was a Stanford math professor, she left California at the age of 18 to explore the country. In the state of Washington, she worked on a salmon fishing boat. After a few months there, she left the West Coast and headed east.
On Cape Cod, she met a New Englander who became her husband. They settled down in the Green Mountain State of Vermont in 1977, living and working on a small, diversified farm that produced beef, maple syrup, honey, and crops, all of which they sold as well as consumed themselves. They also had a pond they stocked with brook trout, for fishing and eating.
For added income, Greenleaf started a craft business, which led to her association with the Stave Company. Although she took art classes in her student years, her talents in illustration and design have been mainly self-taught.
After 33 years in Vermont, Greenleaf yearned to return to sunny California. In 2010, she bought a van and headed back west, taking over a year to arrive in Bishop, a town she remembered for its proximity to beautiful mountains and lakes. There she bought a house, complete with a pond and two huge trout, which didn’t last long — one being eaten, the other disappearing for unknown reasons. (She plans to restock the pond.)
Susan continues to design puzzles for Stave, along with other illustration projects, while also painting nature scenes in watercolor and ink featuring the mountains and lakes in and around Bishop. She has further painted and produced a series of comical postcards, the theme of one set (out of four) being fishing.
