40" x 40"
Original Artwork
Stretched On Canvas
Susannah Paterson (b. 1960, Scotland)
I am an internationally represented Scottish Australian painter and ceramicist living in
Sydney, Australia. I create vibrant and powerful paintings referring to dream states and
symbolic 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. I
was born into a Scottish Highland farming family and was packed off to an English boarding
school from the age of 8. My parents were divorced and both remarried - my father
remaining on the farm in Scotland, and my mother moving to London, marrying a jazz
pianist and living a very bohemian life. It was the stark contrast of these two existences
that I found refuge in the creative - dreams, fantasy, music, stories and art, always looking
for 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 left
to continue developing my art on my own and with the sometimes tough mentoring of the
late Australian artist Kerrie Lester.
Once I became a therapist I found myself learning to look for jewels in a different way. I
wanted to find the golden thread of hope and insight that would provide healing and vision
for my client . Now, on my third career as a painter and a ceramicist, I realise I am doing
the same thing. I am on a new quest to find treasures somewhere in between the marks I
make, my own dream, and my conscious skill.
As a therapist, I studied hypnotherapy, trance and dream states as a path to healing and I
use this knowledge now to allow a painting to tell me what it wants to be. Whilst they all
begin in the same way, some of the works are taken into symbolic narratives, suggested by
the painting itself, whilst others are left in their evocative state. All the time I am looking
for potential beauty, intrigue, or a narrative which provides a vehicle for conversation and
reflection. I paint about infinity, and the infinite possibilities therein, working from a chaotic
and unknown beginning, towards meaning and balance.
My ceramics are more traditional and they keep me grounded and centred. I am exploring
ways to integrate the paintings and the pottery more, and have begun to paint snippets of
my 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 some
sort of chaos. Everything is unknown. The challenge for us is to create something
meaningful and satisfying from the chaos and our inherited “marks”.. I am obsessed with
colour and emotions and the need to keep drawing the viewer’s attention , as I might have
drawn a client’s attention to what is unseen, unexpressed, invisible and what has the
potential and infinite possibility to create something powerful.
