Susan Croy Roth’s pastel landscapes, on exhibit this month at Gallery Fraga, seem to foretell the impending rainy season.

The expanses feature rolling hills in sunlight, with cast shadows moving onto the landscape from clouds off-frame.

It’s an ominous effect – a chilly incursion into the sunny world Roth creates.

“I want to paint what I see, but I also want to convey a mood,” she said. “I want to strive to be even simpler. Just the strips of color, just the simplicity and harmony of colors.

“My constant battle is not to make them too real.”

Roth is inspired, she says, by the work of late 19th-century American landscape painter James Whistler, whom Roth discovered as a student at Chicago Art Institute.

“I love the simplicity of his paintings, the color, the light and his whole concept of how painting should exist just as a painting and for no other reason.”

An iconoclast even among artists, Whistler, an American who lived in France and England for most of his career, moved – like the Impressionists who were contemporaries – away from Victorian pictorialism and toward Modernism, but on his own path.

Although noted for a figurative work, “Whistler’s Mother,” he most often painted landscapes simplified to the point of near-abstraction, bands of luminous color reminiscent of Rothko.

Roth learned to paint by working from the figure in oil.

But as she developed her own vision, the artist picked up pastel and deleted the human form in favor of landscapes that move increasingly toward simplicity.

Each canvas is sized for the image, with scale ranging from just 4-by-6 inches to 12-by-14.

“I don’t do really big work,” Roth said. “To me, pastel feels rich when it’s smaller.”

The pastels of darkening land in near-silhouette against a luminescent sky are appealing. Although she hasn’t had many exhibits, Roth has already placed pieces with collectors – a May 2001 show at Bainbridge Arts and Crafts sold half the works.

“That’s when times were plush, so we’ll see.”

Roth grew up in Troy, Mich., daughter of high school and elementary school teachers.

She was lucky, she says, to be able to attend the private school where her father taught math.

“I took lots of art as a kid,” she said. “I just always loved art and I had a talent. And I had one especially great art teacher.”

Her parents worried about her ability to make a living, and Roth notes that she has worked at a variety of jobs, including bed and breakfasts and coffee shops.

Wherever she worked, however, Roth found a market for her art.

“At the bed and breakfast, I sold to the guests,” she said. “When I worked at the coffee shop, I sold there.”

In 1992, Roth traded Chicago for Aspen, and moved to Seattle two years later to be closer to family. In 1999, she and husband Scott Roth moved to Bainbridge.

The quality of Northwest light and the landscape here are well-suited to her sensibility, she says.

Figurative elements still seldom find their way into her work.

“I did do one of my son walking through a field,” she said. “I hope that one doesn’t sell, though. I’d like to keep it.”

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In October, Gallery Fraga features and exhibit of Karen Sprague Nash’s still-life oil paintings and pastels by Susan Croy Roth. An artist reception will be held 6-8 Oct. 3. Call 842-1150 for more information.