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

She studied Interior Design, then Fine Arts at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas — the Academia de San Carlos of the UNAM — and finished with a postgraduate degree in painting restoration in that same building. She knows how a painting is made, and how one is saved.

Watercolour came later, learned from 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. Fourteen were awarded. 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.

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

Teaching

In 2016 she opened a watercolour studio at the Centro Social in Paseos del Bosque. Wednesdays, eleven to one. Whoever teaches painting learns it twice.

Career

• 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 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.
• 2016Opens her watercolour studio at the Centro Social, Paseos del Bosque.
• 2026Her postcard joins the Winsor & Newton collection, London.