Artist brings paintings home

Press, 14 August 1989, Page 32

Artist brings paintings home

NZPA London A leading New Zealand artist who is better known in Britain than in her homeland is hoping to change all that in the coming months. Susan Wilson will stage three big exhibitions of her work in New Zealand — 13 years after she left her home city of Auckland and settled in London. The first exhibition has already opened at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery. Another is planned for Christchurch and the third in Parnell. “I’ve have had some of my paintings exhibited in New Zealand before but I’ve never had my own major solo show,” Susan said. “It’s really exciting and I’m hoping that people in New Zealand might know me a little better afterwards.” The daughter of a countty clergyman from Waikari, in North Canterbury, Ms Wilson,

aged 37, had no formal art training and was even dissuaded from studying art in favour of academic subjects when she was a student at Westlake Girls’ High School in Auckland. When she left school, she trained as a nurse and became a sister in the neurosurgical unit at Auckland Hospital. In 1976 she went to Britain and visits to the famous London art galleries awakened her interest in painting. “It was great to see in the flesh some of the great paintings which I had only previously seen in books,” she said. She began sketching works of the old masters and, encouraged by friends, decided to give up nursing and enrol at one of the top London schools of art, paying her way by waitressing at nights. It was a taxing time but she was rewarded by passing her Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction. After taking a three-

year pest graduate degree at the Royal Academy she found work as a visiting tutor at a Midlands Polytechnic. All the time she was spending several hours a day in her Kensington studio putting on canvas her impressions of experiences gained during trips to Latin America and Spain.

In 1982 her work was included in the Hayward Gallery’s annual British drawing exhibition and the next year she held a onewoman exhibition which proved one of the most popular at New Zealand House, attracting wide critical acclaim. More success came when she was a National Portrait Gallery John Player Award finalist with the portrait of a young Spanish immigrant who posed for her on condition that she taught him English. In the last few years she has won many more prizes and had her work exhibited at most of the

top British galleries and in Japan.

She hit the headlines when Prince Charles bought one of her paintings — a still-life of six old wine bottles — which caught his eye at a London gallery. She would not say what the future King of England paid for the painting. “But I have heard on the grapevine that he has it on display in his private office,” she said.

She has a big new painting on exhibition at the Royal Academy, and the book publishers, Virago, have used one of her images on the cover of “Balancing Acts,” a book of essays on modern motherhood.

Ms Wilson, who is married to a London business consultant and has a daughter, aged one, and a stepson, aged 16, said she was looking forward to returning to New Zealand for the exhibitions.

But she said she had no plans to return home for good — at least for the foreseeable future.