London, thirty years later

In September 1995, a Mexican woman stood on Bruton Street, in Mayfair, in front of the window of the Roy Miles Gallery. Inside hung her exhibition. The card read: New works by Susana Lezama.

Thirty-one years later, in August 2026, she was told that a postcard of hers had just arrived in London to join this year’s Winsor & Newton collection. She had painted it on a pad she was given at an art supply shop in San Miguel de Allende.

Between one and the other lie more than a hundred exhibitions, seven countries and a lifetime painting with water.

Where she comes from

Her first degree was in Interior Architecture, among architects. Three years of construction drawing, perspective, drawing from life, drawing outdoors — and watercolour, all three years. Watercolour did not come later: it came first. In her own words: “I married that technique.”

That training is what she still works from: composition, balance, how colours are coordinated, how a frame is chosen so that it talks to the house it will hang in.

She then entered the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas — the Academia de San Carlos of the UNAM — for the classical techniques: charcoal, oil, acrylic, egg tempera, printmaking, modelling, the history of art. Watercolour was not taught at San Carlos.

She finished with a postgraduate degree in painting restoration, in that same building. And there the trade sent her the bill: the solvents poisoned her badly enough that her doctor told her to change jobs. So she went back to watercolour, which is worked with nothing but water. She knows how a painting is made, and how one is saved.

Back for good, she studied it with masters: Manuel Arrieta, Roberto Vargas, Guati Rojo, Demetrio Llordén, Primo Vega, Alberto Zúñiga, Huáscar Taborga and Armando Melessio.

What she paints

A woman carrying firewood along a dirt road. Doña Cuca crouching, arranging her cactus paddles. Ripe prickly pears on top of a nopal. An ear of corn opening between its leaves. An agave planted against the hills. An old bicycle leaning on a wall of talavera tiles.

She has exhibited in Barcelona, London, San Francisco, Freiburg, Basel and Havana, and never stopped painting what is here.

Over a little more than 25 years, Susana Lezama has turned drawing into the vehicle for moving freely through life and going deeper into the rivers of watercolour.Jorge Salazar

The prize the other painters gave her

In March 1999 the Color, Agua y Papel competition gathered more than four hundred watercolours from across Mexico. Fourteen were awarded fifteen thousand pesos each: hers won the human figure category.

And there was a separate prize, the Maestro Edgardo Coghlan, for the best work in the whole competition — with one particularity: it was not decided by the jury, it was voted by the prize-winning artists themselves. She came away with two trophies.

It went to Soltemos la carga: a woman with a bundle of firewood on her back, walking.

Thirty years at the Jardín del Arte

She joined in 1990 and left in January 2020. Thirty years setting up her work every week at the Jardín del Arte on Sullivan, in Mexico City — always the same spot, never moving. For some years she also showed on Saturdays in San Ángel. When that chapter closed she moved to the Jardín del Arte in Coyoacán, until the pandemic came.

She puts it this way: “That was the great opportunity of my life as an artist.” Thirty years selling face to face, with no gallery in between, to the people who carried the painting home.

In June 2024, by then living in Querétaro, she was one of the founders of the Jardín del Arte in San Juan del Río, on Plaza Leona Vicario, beside the Templo de Santo Domingo.

Career

• 1990Joins the Jardín del Arte on Sullivan, Mexico City.
• 1992Salón Torremangana, Cuenca, Spain. Her work enters the Museum of Cuenca.
• 1995Solo exhibition at Roy Miles Gallery, Bruton Street, London. Consulate of Mexico in Barcelona.
• 1995Watercolour of the Month, Museo de la Acuarela del Estado de México.
• 1995Doña Cuca y sus nopales on the back cover of Reader’s Digest Selecciones.
• 1996Swanson Fine Art Gallery, San Francisco. Selected by Ciba Laboratories for the 1997 calendar.
• 1997First prize at the 140th Feria de las Flores, San Ángel.
• 1998Latin Gallery, Freiburg, Germany. Arte Latino, Basel, Switzerland.
• 1999First prize, human figure, and Edgardo Coghlan Special Prize for Soltemos la carga.
• 2001Casa de México, Benemérito de las Américas, Havana, Cuba.
• 2008Organises the 1st Grand Watercolour Prize, Jardín del Arte.
• 2010Honourable mention, Museum of Watercolour of the State of Mexico, Toluca.
• 2013A toda vía with ceramicist Mireya Carrera, Centro Cultural La Estación, Querétaro.
• 2016Opens her watercolour studio at the Centro Social, Paseos del Bosque.
• 2017Visiones y recuerdos… gozosos: Museo del Virreinato, San Luis Potosí, and Zanbatha, Museum of the Valley of the Moon, Lerma, State of Mexico.
• 2020Closes thirty years at the Jardín del Arte.
• 2024Founds the Jardín del Arte of San Juan del Río, Querétaro.
• 2025“Reflexiones de lo cotidiano” — Galería Restituto Rodríguez Camacho, Portal del Diezmo, San Juan del Río.
• 2025“Cempasúchil, luz en el camino” — Museo Panteón de la Santa Vera Cruz, San Juan del Río. October and November.
• 2026Her postcard joins the Winsor & Newton collection, London.