A Pink House: The Art of Susan Wilson

IN A ROW OF BRICK VICTORIAN TERRACE HOUSES SITUATED IN THE LEAFY SUBURB OF LADBROKE GROVE, LONDON, ONE HOUSE STANDS APART FROM ITS NEIGHBOURS. IT IS A PINK HOUSE, THE HOME OF ARTIST SUSAN WILSON. SHE HAS LIVED IN LONDON SINCE 1976, HAVING CARVED A NICHE IN THE LONDON ART SCENE, EXHIBITING AND TEACHING CONTINUOUSLY FOR THREE DECADES.

Story & Photography: Penelope Jackson

Wilson had enjoyed holidays in the Bay of Plenty region as a teenager, and therefore thought it fitting to gift a work to the newest public art gallery in New Zealand.

Painted in London, with strong Spanish connections, Wilson’s Toledo Self Portrait typifies her oeuvre, which is an eclectic fusion of Western European influences and New Zealand references, borrowing from her various travels and associations - a journey that began in New Zealand.

Wilson’s father was studying theology when she was born and the family were not at all well off. Wilson remembers her mother commenting often that they “lived on the smell of an oily rag”. However, as she suggests, appearances can be deceptive and people considered the family well-off, since they were always neatly clad. Wilson’s mother was an expert at designing and sewing the family’s clothes. Indeed it is undoubtedly her mother’s fastidious work ethic, together with her sense of design, which permeates through into Wilson’s painting. A South Island Presbyterian childhood offered time for imaginary play and exploration in the Holden to various parishes, with her two brothers in tow. There were few luxuries in life and these strong roots remain integral to her psyche.

Wilson left New Zealand in 1976, abandoning a career in nursing at the head trauma unit at Auckland’s main public hospital. Arriving in London, she immersed herself in the art to be found in the numerous public galleries, which confirmed her new calling to be an artist. She enrolled at Camberwell School of Art and the Royal Academy schools pursuing art training and in particular, painting. Since that time, Wilson has exhibited widely as well as teaching in various art schools. Currently she teaches at the Princes Drawing School, Shoreditch.

Monte Cassino

Each of Wilson’s series of paintings reflects an aspect of her life, whether historically or contemporaneously. For instance, the intensity and horrors of nursing head trauma cases has never been forgotten, and emerged subconsciously in her work series based on Monte Cassino and culminating in the exhibition Cassino Revisited (1994). The works included a cross section of landscapes, the still-life and portraiture. Artistically, she was not trying to recreate or reconstruct a war torn Monte Cassino, but rather to describe visually the narrative of her own, and her parents, journey to a place which had previously only lived in her imagination and that of her mother for more than forty years. Wilson’s father had been a stretcher bearer at Monte Cassino during World War II. Artistically, Monte Cassino was also about appropriation; Wilson’s Madonna Still Life, calls upon Piero della Francesca’s Madonna of Mercy (1444-64). Set as a backdrop, the artist’s stool and other objects placed in the foreground of the painting, act as an altarpiece.

Wilson’s 1987 sojourn to Monte Cassino was collectively cathartic for her entire family. With considerable emotion, Wilson notes: “When my father walked across the lawn at Cassino cemetery, to look at the New Zealand graves which lie below the monastery hill, he was overwhelmed by memory, grief and unease at having lived another forty years”.

Wilson is best known in Britain for her strong, heavy duty portraits, painted in a realist manner. They are not just ‘warts and all’ renderings of people, but rather she is able to take her sitters beyond the purely representational. Though her sitters are recognisable (traditionally a measure of a successful portrait), Wilson adds a powerful angle which encapsulates a message or statement.

For instance, in her Self-Portrait with Kete, she hugs, as if a person, a kete purchased in Rotorua at the time of her mother’s funeral.

The slippers behind Wilson had previously belonged to her mother, a symbol of their close mother/daughter relationship. In a series of self portraits made in the late nineties, Wilson depicted herself as a woman of many personas: a nurse, an exile (Self-Portrait as Katherine Mansfield), a mourner (Farewell Stellae), and a traveller (Toledo Self-Portrait). As an artist she is able to tease out the very essence of character.

In late 2007, Wilson was a runner up in the Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize for her portrait, The Young Oxford Undergraduate. London is a leading world art centre and much of the art produced and exhibited nowadays is of a conceptual or abstract nature. Wilson’s submitted portrait was of English literature undergraduate Joe Parham, wearing a majestic Coldstream Guard’s jacket, purchased on the Portobello Road. The overall appearance of Wilson’s sitter is similar to that of a romantic poet. Wilson captured a look and intensity which gives an insight into character and personality, a tradition that is particularly English. This year Wilson was runner up in another major London art award, the Threadneedle Figurative Prize.

Wilson’s Studio

The studio is central to a portrait artist’s practice. Wilson’s studio, originally the master bedroom, is upstairs at the front of the pink house. Facing the street, the large bay window fills the studio with light - an essential for a Northern Hemisphere artist and especially one working from objects situated before them, such as the still life or portraiture. The carefully considered objects in, for example, A Conversation with Rahera, evolved after a visit to New Zealand in which she purchased and read Patricia Grace’s Tu. Rahera Windsor was the Kuia of the New Zealand Maori community in Britain. In the background, an intricately designed breadboard was purchased in Wellington exclusively as a subject for painting.

The still life is also a subject Wilson continues to return to, perhaps indicative of the English climate, where indoor painting is often more feasible and practical. Each still-life object is specifically chosen, including Wilson’s rich collection of postcards often of well-known reproductions of old masters. In this sense,

her still life paintings are portraits too; a large number of the still-life compositions contain portraits within them, many appropriated from reproductions, postcards and book covers. Additionally, living in central London affords fewer landscape vistas than New Zealanders have to choose from. The still life is also very much part of Wilson’s teaching programme; in early July, when the figs were ripe in Wilson’s garden, her students were set the task of painting them (as did Wilson); the texture and juiciness of the figs was conveyed by Wilson’s use of thick impasto paint.

New Zealander at Heart

Throughout her three decades abroad, New Zealand imagery returns repeatedly to Wilson’s work. Though continuously exposed to, and exploring, other artistic influences, Wilson is a New Zealander at heart. The clues are to be found in her paintings. In 2000, she completed a series illustrating Katherine Mansfield’s short stories; Wilson has an affinity with the writer who left New Zealand never to return permanently.

During summer, a work in progress in Wilson’s studio was the double portrait, Rose and Gertie. Rose walks her dog Gertie in the vicinity of Wilson’s pink house. One day Wilson invited the ‘couple’ in to pose for their portrait. Rose, who lives at her allotment, has a certain wild unkempt look about her but Gertie is a serious, well groomed and contemplative subject. The spade in the painting, provides a context for Rose’s allotment lifestyle. In a sense these paintings call upon formal eighteenth-century English portrait painting, yet the subjects are far removed from historical wealthy patrons. There is irony in the fact that that the roles have been reversed in the above example; here, the artist has invited the sitters to pose. Historically, the sitter would commission the artist to paint the portrait; the artist’s payment, and often future successes, depended on the customer’s satisfaction. Portraiture also represents the relationships between sitter, artist and audience, a characteristic not practiced with other subjects.

Wilson could be perceived as an expatriate artist. This is not unusual in itself, since New Zealand has a long tradition of expatriate artists. As soon as European artists arrived in New Zealand, others seem to depart. However, since Wilson did not leave New Zealand as an artist, her position is different; thwarted and frustrated by the New Zealand of the seventies, she ended up in London and retrained as an artist. Equally, she could be labelled as an English artist. Given the New Zealand (and Western European) content of her paintings, her position is somewhat precarious. Unfortunately, some art historians and art commentators persist in pigeonholing artists. Wilson is a ‘round peg in a square hole’.

At London’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 2007, two works by Wilson were accepted by the hanging committee. Both were of the still life genre, one Roman and the other with its roots in Marche. Yet a little piece of New Zealand is present; the artist’s stool on which Wilson arranges her still-life objects is shrine-like, with ‘special’ objects and picture postcards or reproductions of art on the background wall. The idea of the tabletop originates from the bedside cabinets used in hospitals, which hold and display a patient’s belongings - a photo, a vase of flowers, fruit -

a still life in itself and a hint of individuality within a clinical context.

Evidence of her continued links is to be found in the various New Zealand paintings calling on iconic New Zealand objects, which are scattered about her studio in her pink house. Wilson is a delightfully vivacious person, with great insight and artistic knowledge. Her house reflects her character and it is no surprise that her London house is pink, the living room canary yellow, with paintings filling each wall, and the former master bedroom, with its paint splattered floor, is her studio.