Charleston artist Susan Romaine began her professional art career in 2000 after retiring from a career in the investment industry. Since then, she has become well known for her paintings of urban environments by collectors of fine art nationwide, with her work in numerous private and corporate collections and The Gibbes Museum. Romaine has also received national critical acclaim. In his 2006 "Closer Look" column for Art & Antiques Magazine, international art critic, John Spike, recently wrote: "Like Hopper, Romaine is a realist who enjoys thick paint and solid geometry. This glimpse of Western storefronts (in her painting, ‘Lion Park Surround') is as carefully composed as Hopper's ‘Early Sunday Morning', which in turn is a Mondrian in bricks and mortar…Seventy years after Hopper, the buildings are the same, yet the plot has changed…To Hopper's habitual question, ‘Isn't this sad?' Romaine seems to respond: This is how it is." Dottie Ashley of "The Post and Courier" noted, "Those who have seen her work feel much of it is reminiscent of Edward Hopper's but with its own distinctive penumbra". Paul Weideman of "The New Mexican" in his review of her one-woman show "Urban Still West" wrote: "Romaine's naturalistic portrayals of historic buildings in Santa Fe and Las Vegas, NM, possess an austere and haunting beauty." The American Art Collector described a recently completed work, "Riverside" "…a truly beautiful painting." Primarily self taught, Romaine studied with two highly acclaimed artists, Burton Silverman of New York, an Oil Painters of America Master and Clifton Peacock of the College of Charleston, a Guggenheim Fellow. Through a juried process, she was invited to join Oil Painters of America in 2001 and was appointed Artist in Residence by the Gibbes Museum for the year 2003/2004. She and photographer, Jack Alterman, published Cornices of Charleston, a book of her paintings and his photographs, in 2005. In 2006, Romaine was named one of ten artists to watch by Southwest Art magazine. Romaine is represented by fine art galleries in Charleston, South Carolina and Santa Fe, New Mexico.