Archive News
Not a Still Life - 29 Jul 2009
Expatriate New Zealander, artist Susan Wilson, comes to Tauranga Art Gallery, with an exhibition titled Not A Still Life: the art of Susan Wilson.
London based for the past three decades, Wilson is best known for her strong portraits, painted in a representational manner. Her sitters are recognisable, traditionally a measure of a successful portrait, but she adds an angle which encapsulates a message or statement.
The still-life is also a subject Wilson continues to return to. Wilson approaches her still-life images in a similar manner to designing the set for a stage, influenced by her fascination with crammed hospital beside cabinets. Each still-life object is specifically chosen, like characters in a theatre, many of which she uses repeatedly like favourite actors. The paintings also often contain portraits within them, many appropriated from reproductions, book covers or postcards.
Wilson painted landscapes as a child growing up in New Zealand, attempting to capture the purple-blue, snow covered mountains in the south, and discussing with her mother how to get the multiplicity of the colour in the sea. However, she never practiced art in New Zealand. It wasn’t until she left for Europe in 1976, then in her mid-twenties, that she studied art at the Camberwell and Royal Academy in London. Since then, she has exhibited widely, and currently teaches at Princes Drawing School in Shoreditch.
However Wilson retains a strong attachment to New Zealand and exhibits here regularly. New Zealand imagery is often included in her work, and in 2000 she completed a series illustrating Katherine Mansfield’s short stories for The Folio Society.
The exhibition runs through to 20 September.
© 2009