These past few months haven’t been easy for painter Susan Whiting. Food was sticking in her throat and she had a hard time swallowing. The trouble started in the latter part of 2023, and it wasn’t going away.

Susan admits she waited a little longer than she should have to see a doctor; and then being diagnosed with esophageal cancer was quite a shock. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I go to the gym all the time. We (she and husband Chris Manning) lead a healthy lifestyle. I was just feeling kind of invincible. I think a lot of people feel that way. But, you know, there’s stuff in our food, there’s stuff in the air. And it could have started a long time ago, who knows.”

Well, first the diagnosis, and then the chemo and radiation. “Chemo was the last thing I wanted to do,” Susan says. However, radiation treatment was worse, “because it just burns. It feels like a burning pain in your chest. But I’m glad I did it, and I’m glad I have a good prognosis.”

That’s because the cancer was caught before it could wander off into other parts of the body, which leads to her important admonition: “I encourage anybody who is having trouble swallowing to get to the doctor right away; don’t wait.” Unfortunately, people do wait, we often procrastinate because most aches and pains vanish on their own. This one, though, isn’t part of that family.

Her conversation, and I have to point this out, is serious and thoughtful, always punctuated with laughs. That’s one thing her illness could not pry away from her, her sense of fun and her sense of humor. She has, however, lost several pounds, but her friend and fellow artist Debbie Giese has been bringing her a fortune in ice cream and that’s helped to turn the tide.

And now?

“Now I’m really looking forward to getting back into enjoying food again,” Susan replies. “They say it takes about three or four weeks after you’re all done before the pain is low enough that you can enjoy food again.”

But for the moment she remains an ice cream junkie.

Getting back to the easel

She may or may not be completely cured, but Susan is optimistic and ready to resume painting full time. She’s got a show coming up later this month and another in December, and that’s in addition to the commissions she often receives for portraits of people and pets. “Capturing the Spirit,” opening June 22 at the Palos Verdes Peninsula Library, came about because her painting of a young ballerina was awarded the People’s Choice at a recent exhibition. Details below.

I think it goes without saying that her immersion in art is also a kind of healing therapy, and it certainly takes her mind off her ailments.

“When I’m painting,” Susan explains, “time just stops. I just go into this timeless place.” Before she’s even aware of it, hours have passed.

She’s also taking a painting class from Debbie Giese, and she enjoys the camaraderie with other like-minded artists. “We do our own thing, but we’re there to learn from each other and to support each other.” Naturally it’s a different milieu than when she paints at home, but that shared companionship is a nice balance to the solitude of her own studio.

Susan was also one of the artists who participated in “Are You Thinking What I’m Thinking?”, an exhibition in which 30+ artists were asked to create an image based on a title chosen at random. The work was displayed a couple of years ago at the Palos Verdes Art Center, the Malaga Cove Library Art Gallery, and, last year, at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton. Susan’s titles? “The Chocolate Night” and “Waking Sleeping Beauty with a Slap”. She welcomed the challenge, which required her to do some out-of-the-box thinking before sitting down to paint.

In her 20s, Susan was a sketch artist at Disneyland. For eight years, she could be found on Main Street, working in pastel, making hundreds if not thousands of portraits. She was at UC Irvine as a dance major when she started. So what made her take a job doing art?

“The only reason I even applied was that my really cute blonde roommate, who couldn’t draw anything — I mean, she was pathetic, but she was really cute — was hired. And I thought, if she can do it, I can do it. And so I went and applied. And they hired me.”

The experience was invaluable. The Disney folks wanted their artists to complete a work in seven minutes, but Susan says it always took her at least twice that. In retrospect? “I’m glad I did it, and I’m really glad I don’t have to do it anymore.”

Susan’s brushwork is somewhat looser today, although she’s very much a realist painter. Her art classes in college, she says, weren’t very instructive. And not only that. “At the school they were into weirdness. I had a roommate, she’d find a dead rat and put it on bread and put it under glass, and she called it ‘Rat on Rye’. And she got awards for that. One guy sat in a locker for two weeks and someone fed him through the slats.” (She doesn’t say anything about bathroom breaks)

Well, sometimes we see a piece and we wonder if the artist is going for the shock effect in lieu of displaying any technical skills.

“What is important for me,” Susan says in response, “is that when I paint I want to feel something. That’s why I like to paint water, to make crashing waves.” Flowers and sunsets also. “And I love entering the horse show contest every year.”

Those are fairly standard topics, but then again Susan grew up on the Peninsula where sunsets, flowers, water — and horses — are not so uncommon. But what’s key is her openness to new subjects and new ideas. And although she’s been painting for decades, each new endeavor demands time, energy, and concentration. Furthermore:

“I’m learning more about myself, like who I am. I mean, what could be more important than that, to go through life and just find out who you are, and grow?” But painting is rarely, if ever, a walk in the park. “With every painting I do there’s always a part of it where it’s sort of a struggle. You start out thinking ‘This is going to be easy,’ and then you get going and you think, ‘Oh, oh…’ And then I work through it. You climb the mountain. You get there.”

There’s a poster contest each spring that promotes the Portuguese Bend National Horse Show, and Susan has entered it every year. “I love that it brings awareness of [and benefits] the Children's Hospital Los Angeles, and it also benefits the Palos Verdes Art Center.”

Susan has won top honors in this contest and encourages others to participate. However, to participate one needs to have some affiliation with the PVAC. That doesn’t mean that one has to be a practicing artist; one merely needs to become a member of this fine organization.

As mentioned, Susan’s horse paintings are well received, and often place high in the balloting. And so it’s fair to ask her: How do you know when a painting is finished?

“The way that I was taught that you know it’s finished,” she replies, “is when you can’t improve it more than two percent.”

She qualifies this by saying that it’s of course a matter of personal opinion, but anyone who has been making art for as long as she has intuitively knows when it’s time to lay aside the brushes.

We’ve all got talent

Years ago, an art critic looked over Susan’s work and told her she had a raw talent — but that her pictures were amateurish. It was a devastating comment and, Susan says, “I quit painting for about two years.” A course at Long Beach State helped to restore her confidence, but careless remarks like that can dash the hopes of any young and aspiring artist — and not just in painting.

Susan has strong words for these kinds of naysayers.

“I don’t believe in crushing an artist’s spirit. If there’s an art teacher who says, ‘Oh, you can’t draw,’ I hate that, because I think everybody can draw. I don’t believe in telling people they can’t do something, like, ‘You have no talent.’ Why would you do that? I don’t get it.”

This hits home for Susan in other ways as well.

“I worked with abused kids for a couple of years at the Polinsky Children's Center. I’m not an art therapist, but I worked with an art therapist and she taught me how to work with the kids. I learned that you get down on their level, and you have them tell you about their drawing. ‘Tell me about your drawing. Does it make you feel safe? What could you add to make it feel safer?’ One thing I never did was tell them it was a bad painting.”

Good days ahead

And so, as we’ve seen, Susan has had a rough stretch these past few months, but she’s facing the future with hope and enthusiasm.

“I’m really excited about this year,” she says, “and all the things coming up. I’m really excited about where I’m going to go with my art.”

Susan escorts me into her backyard where she has a small studio, a former aviary if we want to go into specifics, and there are works on the easel. She’s regaining her health, her strength, and has resumed painting for her upcoming shows. But she loves doing portrait commissions, too. Contact her if you’re interested. She’ll spend much more time on them than she did on those she made when working in the Magic Kingdom.

Susan’s exhibition at the Palos Verdes Library opens on Saturday, June 22, with a reception from 2 to 4 p.m. It’ll be on view through August 2. Her show at the Malaga Cove Library Art Gallery opens on Dec. 2 and runs through mid-January. Now, to reach Susan Whiting Manning, call (858) 382-7553 or email swhiting50@yahoo.com. Her website is SusanWhitingPortraits.com.

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Many of you have seen Bondo Wyszpolski with notepad and camera in hand at all kinds of community events, ready for interviews and photo shoots. Bondo has also reviewed thousands of plays, movies, concerts, books, art shows and operas. He prefers the Baroque operas by Henry Purcell and Handel, while his favorites among modern composers are Sergei Rachmaninoff and Ralph Vaughn Williams, and he also enjoys some African music. He favors the Symbolist painters of the 1890s and though he studied the standard authors from Poe to Hemingway in college, he now reads mostly foreign writers such as Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez from Colombia, both Nobel Prize winners. In fact, it was after The Los Angeles Times published one of Bondo’s book reviews that Kevin Cody, the owner and publisher of the Easy Reader, hired Bondo full time as an arts and entertainment editor in 1993. Before that Bondo wrote for the now-defunct Beach Cities Newspapers. Bondo grew up in Palos Verdes Estates, attended Lunada Bay Elementary School, Margate Middle School, and Palos Verdes High School.