“Back Then, A Mixture of Things Happened” By Susannah Paterson, Oil On Canvas

Description

40″ x 40″

Original Artwork

Stretched On Canvas

Susannah Paterson (b. 1960, Scotland)I am an internationally represented Scottish Australian painter and ceramicist living inSydney, Australia. I create vibrant and powerful paintings referring to dream states andsymbolic narratives, and I a ceramicist too, making individual functional or sculptural pieces.I have always been a dreamer – probably to counter a difficult and unusual childhood. Iwas born into a Scottish Highland farming family and was packed off to an English boardingschool from the age of 8. My parents were divorced and both remarried – my fatherremaining on the farm in Scotland, and my mother moving to London, marrying a jazzpianist and living a very bohemian life. It was the stark contrast of these two existencesthat I found refuge in the creative – dreams, fantasy, music, stories and art, always lookingfor silver linings and treasure in the mineshaft of loneliness.After a career in the music industry promoting live concerts, I moved to Australia in 1995,and began to study psychotherapy concurrently with painting. I attended art school(Brookvale TAFE) for 2 years, but found the system stifling and robbing me of joy, so I leftto continue developing my art on my own and with the sometimes tough mentoring of thelate Australian artist Kerrie Lester.Once I became a therapist I found myself learning to look for jewels in a different way. Iwanted to find the golden thread of hope and insight that would provide healing and visionfor my client . Now, on my third career as a painter and a ceramicist, I realise I am doingthe same thing. I am on a new quest to find treasures somewhere in between the marks Imake, my own dream, and my conscious skill.As a therapist, I studied hypnotherapy, trance and dream states as a path to healing and Iuse this knowledge now to allow a painting to tell me what it wants to be. Whilst they allbegin in the same way, some of the works are taken into symbolic narratives, suggested bythe painting itself, whilst others are left in their evocative state. All the time I am lookingfor potential beauty, intrigue, or a narrative which provides a vehicle for conversation andreflection. I paint about infinity, and the infinite possibilities therein, working from a chaoticand unknown beginning, towards meaning and balance.My ceramics are more traditional and they keep me grounded and centred. I am exploringways to integrate the paintings and the pottery more, and have begun to paint snippets ofmy favourite bits from my images onto large wheel thrown platters.I do see the creative process as an analogy of life. We are all born by chance, into somesort of chaos. Everything is unknown. The challenge for us is to create somethingmeaningful and satisfying from the chaos and our inherited marks.. I am obsessed withcolour and emotions and the need to keep drawing the viewers attention , as I might havedrawn a clients attention to what is unseen, unexpressed, invisible and what has thepotential and infinite possibility to create something powerful.