A renowned artist and bookbinder based in Penwith, Sue’s inspiration comes from walking in Cornwall and Scilly and watching the landscape slowly change with the seasons.
Her watercolour sketches of this special landscape are hugely popular, and she produces sketchbooks for publication as well as handmade artist’s books for galleries and commissions.
Tell us a bit about yourself…
I went to art school and trained up to be an illustrator and started out doing that in London. Then, I moved to Cornwall and started etching and printmaking. I did that more or less until I moved to Scilly, which was at the end of the 80s and the colour was so bright that I wanted to work outside instead of working on an etching plate in the studio, so I took up watercolours. I’ve kind of been stuck with that ever since.
What about watercolours inspires you?
I like the way it moves, so you use it wet and you can play with the colour and it blends itself and you get a surprise, which you can control. Also, it’s easy and light to carry around so if you like to work outdoors, which I do, you’re not waiting for anything to dry for too long so it’s by far the easiest thing to carry around with you.
As I get older, I like to be outdoors but on a bench near a cafe. Even if I don’t do the painting outdoors, sketching outdoors gives you the initial kind of feel of the place because that’s your immediate reaction to it whereas if you work with photographs – which I’ve had to for some of the books I’ve done in the past – you can remember it but you haven’t got that immediate reaction. A photograph gives you every single detail which you don’t need when what you do need is that impulse. So sometimes, if I need to, I go out with a phone, but I also take the sketchbook, pencil and pen so I can get quick impressions. Outdoors is best.
What does Cornwall’s heritage mean to you?
I was interested in archaeology before, but moving to Cornwall there’s so much of it and it was such a great discovery. It has been built up out of the landscape and is now going back into being part of the landscape. It’s really interesting. It shows me how people live, and there’s a lot of the remains of that around. The houses are old, even if the house is only 200 years old, it’s probably been built on a site which has been lived on for a long time so it’s always something about the past and present mixing together really.
What are you looking forward to as part of the residency?
Knowing more about the places because once I’ve learnt more, I just want to ask questions about the people. There are reasons people built these places where they did, and there’s lots of stuff that we’ve lost, knowledge we don’t have. It fascinates me that they did have it. They needed to know how to find water for a start and they must have also had good places and bad places; all that excites me. That they had much more real knowledge than we’ve got; we’re too separated from it now.
