The Oxford undergraduate muses on the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon (2007), Oil on linen, 910 x 710mm.
Susan Wilson
Notting Hill : Kaikoura
Tuesday 10 April – Sunday 27 May, public opening Monday 9 April from 6pm
Boardroom, Little Gallery and Master Bedroom
“I am just trying to make something personal.” – Bonnard
Susan Wilson, b.1951, grew up in remote mountain country in Southland where her Father’s parish included Milford Sound and Lakes Manapouri, Te Anau to the foot of Wakatipu. It was wild, and the shingle roads were dangerous. The family moved to Waikari, North Canterbury when the artist was seven.
Susan was educated at rural schools in the South Island and graduated at Auckland Public Hospital with Distinction. She later worked in the Neurosurgical Unit until departure for Tahiti and Peru in 1976. On arrival in Europe, she moved to Notting Hill, London, 1976.
Susan Wilson studied at Camberwell School of Art & Crafts and The Royal Academy Schools, London. Her exhibition history is extensive with many solo and group shows in New Zealand and the U.K. Represented by Browse & Darby 19 Cork St London W1. She taught at Chelsea School of Art (BA & MA Painting 1992-2000). She is a Senior Member of Faculty at The Royal Drawing School.
“I am not able, nor can I explain what I do. It is up to the visitor to look and think and find what they will in the images. I don’t work from photographs always working from life, from objects and outdoors in the landscape. It’s more interesting. The wind blows, the sun shifts, the sea roars, the boat rocks. Who would want to be in the studio copying photographs? The world is too interesting and too ever changing for that.”
Still Life as Metaphor
“I like the Italian Still life painters, Carlo Carra, Morandi and de Chirico. These pictures need to be still, contain ideas, and speak of symbols. I made them after travelling, notably to Cassino where Dad was a stretcher bearer with the New Zealand Medical Corps. I set them up as shrines in my studio.
Self Portraits and Portraits
Two are included in this exhibition. The New Zealand Portrait Gallery’s “Farewell Stelae ll” where I painted myself, wearing my Dads modest array of medals (he had refused to bear arms) and looked into my Ladbroke Grove mirror. I painted this immediately after my father’s death in 1993. These were shown in the Touring Exhibition “In the Looking Glass “ which was opened by Germaine Greer in Lincoln and was accompanied by a conference at the ICA. Dr Judith Collins, then Keeper of British 20th Century Art at Tate wrote the catalogue interviews. The then Keeper Richard Morphet wanted to buy the three works in this series for the Tate’s Collection. The Aigantighe self portrait was made two years later after my mothers death, with the same idea in mind. Who am I now that you have gone? Who will I be? Where do I come from?
Portraits can be self portraits
When Rahera Windsor QSM Kuia and founder/leader of Ngati Ranana came to my studio to sit, she chose to wear some of my clothes. She and I shared a North Canterbury background. She had been invited to work on a Waiau Sheep Station as a girl and took a bus from Waiau to Christchurch regularly. She knew Waikari and the Weka Pass with its fantastical weather sculpted rocks and Maori rock paintings. She too, loved the landscape and the rivers.
Kaikoura
I did a lot of growing up on Jimmy Harmer Beach in Kaikoura. It’s the little sandy flat rock-fringed beach you pass as you go around the Point to the Seal Colony When the tide is out it has those grey, creased smooth rocks that when you are six you can jump over and search pools for seaweed, limpets and fish. You peer into Edmund Gosse’s magical world, the same one Katherine Mansfield describes in “At The Bay”.
Ron Symes owned and farmed the Point. He had been in the War with my father in Italy and before that he had filed horses’ teeth on the Canterbury Plains. He and his wife Phyllis made us welcome on a small piece of land, smooth and flat like the rocks in the paddock in front of the beach. Now I know there was a kumara pit underneath us and recent archaeological digs revealed a crouching Maori warrior holding an intact moa egg in his arms. But we knew nothing of this. We slept well and lived simply in tents and a little plywood caravan.
I learned to swim at the beach and would fish from the jetty and play for hours with my brothers. Rudi Gopas painted there and I watched him one day as he sat at his easel and talked to him. It pleased me to see an artist outdoors at work. When the tide was out I searched the shore for paua pieces, a tiny gleam would catch my eye, and I wanted lovely sea-worn fragments.
The recent earthquakes came as a terrible shock. I always had Kaikoura in my mind as a paradise, somewhere that would never change and that I could go back to. This presentation is my homage to that most lovely of landscapes.
The sketchbook I have included in this exhibition is for visitors to browse. In it are 43 images made over 30 years of the Kaikoura township, coast, mountains, and views down this coast from Cook Strait while crossing on the ferry. I use a variety of media, ink, pen, pencil coloured pencil, biro and I make sure that my sketchbooks are all different sizes. I always draw and have a sketchbook with me. My teaching now is about drawing.
London
In 1976 I moved to a cold water flat at the top of a white stucco building on Lancaster Road, Notting Hill. I’ve never lived in the England everyone imagines. I have always lived, as the Rastas say “In de Grove”. Hockney said it was a place where you could be “bohemian”. He lived in the next street.
The streets were lively, often angry, always noisy, and full of mostly men – Rastas, day and night. The popular view was that this street was a “no go area” but I could walk through at any time. It’s not the same now. The stucco buildings were dirty and shabby – paint peeling and there was rubbish on the streets. Basing Street was one block down where so much of the music from the 70s to the 90s was recorded.
From here I biked each day well before dawn to St Thomas’ Hospital to work in the Intensive Care Unit. Difficult, distressing and sad work. I cycled there and back in the snow, all winter. On my days off I went to the ballet, opera and theatre and saw exhibitions. Something about Notting Hill thrilled me. The Cinemas – Electric and Gate – the stucco houses, the Rastafarians and Portobello Road. The style on the street, the markets, secondhand clothes and plates, anything you wanted was always there. Christian Lacroix has described how he always came to see the Portobello Market to get ideas. Certainly it triggered many of my still life paintings. The Spanish feeling of it is created by the refugees from Franco’s Spain who had come to live there. The Portuguese and Moroccan, especially on the Golborne Road where my children grew up. I would push them in a buggy past Lucian Freud who sat in the Lisboa drinking coffee surrounded by a bevy of girls from the Slade in paint spattered overalls with paintbrushes stuck in their tousled hair. We would go past Trellick Tower and around to Meanwhile Gardens, squatted in ’76 by a Chelsea Art School student who wanted to save the land for a park. He built a huge cement fondue crocodile for the children in the play area – the water still runs down its back. These streets, hard by the Grenfell Tower, right by the A40 elevated section, are mine. The small room of portrait heads is my homage to Nottinghill and the people who live there.”