Susan Wilson

Oil on linen 2023

40” x 30”

The wreath is a headdress made by Cook Island women who came as a group to visit the graves of soldiers who fell in France in WW1. Dana said it reminded her of floral crowns worn by women for cultural events in Ukraine.

Oil on linen

Reworked in 2023

Sir John Elliott, Regius Professor of History

“I drive to Rome”

Oil on board 12’ x 12”

2019

We stay at the British School at Rome for a month and I paint the pines of Rome from the rooftop throughout the heat of August.

The Archaeologist

Oil on linen

40” x 30”

2022

Grenfell Tower in Spring from my studio

40” x 30”

Oil on linen

2022

Cowboy painting, & Hispanic Italy

Oil on linen

36” x 28”

2022

The Pines of Rome

(From the British School at Rome)

One of a series, all the same size, from the rooftop overlooking the Borghese Gardens.

My  daughter from memory

(She was living in the USA)

12” x 10”

Oil on linen

2022

Tenisia painted by a Pacific Islander

Oil on linen 2022

40” x 30”

Oil on canvas

2022

Oil on linen 12” x10”

Painted in Rome 2019

Sue pressed these into my hands when I last saw her. “Suze, we wore these at school for gym, do you remember?” She was at Takapuna Grammar School, I was at rival school Westlake Girls. They cost 20 bucks, she said.

Sue was, for nearly all of my life, a true, loyal companion.

I walked around Rome in them in the hot August of 2019, so I placed “Palladios Guide to Rome“ under them to paint the picture. This reprint of Palladios exploration of Rome is a delight, you get an idea of how Rome was, for pilgrims in his time.

Then, at the back of the British School at Rome (BSR), having worn them out I put them in the large recycling bin late at night when taking my dog out for her last walk. Rome then, in the narrow street behind the BSR lined with recent, handsome palazzi, saw maids walking dogs and chatting in the cooler air, valets resting on chairs in the dark, one, with a broken leg propped up, surrounded by family. It was a delight. Soft, warm, dark nights, elegant, decorated houses, huge trees in pretty gardens.

16x14” oil on board

2020.

This was my first painting during lockdown 2020.

Oil on linen

14”x12”

It wasn't so bad to be locked down in Ladbroke Grove. I could walk down streets I did not know, cross the over bridge that cuts above the tube and under the motorway, buy a coffee at Panella’s under Trellick Tower, walk to see my son on Golbourne Rd, and wander with my dog around the high white stucco houses at night in Nottinghill, festooned with Christmas lights. I did light tours with a friend, each of us well spaced apart. At the top of Portobello a gaudy glorious display of all colours, shooting stars, a Bethlehem, mother and child winked and blinked in the soft yellow brown night. Another, multi coloured one near me twinkled dazzling blue, green red, yellow and white with little white deer, mother and fawn, winking and sparkling below. The more wildly kitsch the more they cheered and delighted us.

20”x12” oil on board

2022

14” x12” oil on canvas

2004

9.75 x 7” oil on board

2022

Magnolia bloom very fast and the peak passes rapidly. When you stare at them all day you remember that they are from Asia, which when passing them quickly by on foot you can forget. We are used to them.

Hidden in a front garden passersby could not see me, I heard snatches of phone calls: a cleaner speaking in Spanish, anxious to defend her cleaning away of dust, she was being bossed about, the man on the other end of the phone telling her to stick to the truth. A dog owner I went by and the dog stopped, smelling me. The owner couldn’t work out why it had stopped.

I try to never work from photos or screens. Being in a garden with passersby coming and going is lovely - except when a woman idled a smelly diesel car beside me to pick up coffees. Then I painted crossly.

Oil on board 20” x12”

This was painted at the time of David Davies death. I had given him a drawing of this painting made when it was loaned to London.

David Davies found me as a student drawing Velasquez in the National Gallery and used to talk to me about Spanish painting.

We students used to run along Piccadilly to get to his lectures at the NG in our lunchtime in the 1980's. He was brilliant.

He curated several exhibitions on El Greco and wrote extensively on Hapsburg court dress. He taught generations of students at UCL.

Once he said to me "I start with the object." I try to follow.

Oil on board reworked 2022

12” x12”

Nurses were on my mind in the first two lockdowns. Unvaccinated, without proper protective gear, they went to work. The bravery and heroism was hard to believe. They were on the front line. My whole street clapped them, and we meant every clap.

I don’t understand why the legacy of the great women pioneers of nursing , Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole, Edith Cavell hasn't led to nursing having a higher social status in the UK. Many are migrant workers, Filipinos, Indians, Eastern Europeans. Without them the NHS could not function. Nurses are highly skilled, required to operate complex technology, understand modern pharmacology, and calm anxious souls in pain and distress in the middle of the night. When called, they come, and in seconds have to diagnose, assess, treat us and talk us through our fears. It is an astonishing expectation, and they, the heroic nurses of 2020-21 deserve better respect (and better pay).

I was an ICU nurse for many years both in New Zealand and in the UK. I wore this uniform, but with a pretty lace cap, red belt and plain apron. In my class at the Royal Drawing School I invent costumes for my models, so here I have created my own Norman Hartnell circa 1976 copy of what i wore when doing the rounds on Mead Ward, the ICU at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. The shirt and cap are from Margaret Howell. The badges are NZ SRN and RMN entitling me to deliver a baby in the outback if need be.

The critic Laura Gascoigne invited artists to create works addressing the pandemic and a passage from the Decameron.

I began this in the Winter of 2020, under no illusion about the capacity of COVID-19 to make us ill. I nursed in the London Hospital for Tropical Diseases just before starting at Camberwell and the consultants then had warned us of transmission via airports of new viruses. Even in 1976 the airports and certain flights were monitored and sick travellers put into isolation in our ward. I worried all through February and March, caught COVID-19 off a teenager coughing fit to burst on the Number 9 bus at Piccadilly, and had long covid for several months, with vertigo, and high blood pressure which no-one could then understand. So it is a fearful running, hiding picture with a city beyond of dog walkers in the Wormwood Scrubs - the only activity left for us to do for months on end.

The winter was peaceful, quiet and calm in Ladbroke Grove. I walked my dog night and morning, in rain and early dark evenings. On shiny empty wet streets I would walk to Golbourne Road to collect a cooked meal from my son, accompanied by the ever faithful pointer, Bella. The tall stucco buildings looked handsome in the night, lights on wherever I looked, but silent. No one around on the pavement, just a soft, sepia brown silent night.

By day I made these small self portraits, my hair got longer, my mood changed. I tried to have those ancient virtues, patience and fortitude, and often often thought of my great aunt Mary Dyson who lived through the Blitz in a flat beside Selfridges. And I thought of Dad, sleeping in the trench he dug and lined with straw at Monte Cassino in World War II, to avoid flying shrapnel.

10”x8”, Oil on linen
2020

Oil on board, 16” x 10”
2020

Just before the Pandemic began I booked a studio for the summer at The British School at Rome (BSR). Our London street was being ravaged by inconsiderate builders, dust thick in the air, trucks being driven into and wrecking street trees, the interminable basement works typical of our neighbourhood. So, we left, taking the hound and drove to Rome. Our road took us over the cobbled Hapsburg zig zagging pass from near Lucern to Milan, the old route for Hapsburg bullion, from the mountaintop to the plain below, then, on into Liguria for two days by the wine dark sea. Rome was hot, with dazzling light, the Borghese Gardens drenched in luminous light and glowing shade, the streets hard to pass along. The nights were hot, but lovely to walk the dog at 11pm through the palace lined villas behind the school, with maids and valets chatting on chairs in the dark. There are Mussolini flats on a street once called “The Avenue of Fascist Martyrs” and now called “Bruno Buozzi” after a resistance fighter. The flats are marble with balconies, railings and steps of modernist design and high quality. The streets are lined with flowering oleander.

I went to the Foro Italico twice and walked with the hound right up to the Milvian Bridge, site of Constantines battle. In the BSR’s excellent library I devoured the information they had on Mussolini's Rome. This I had never explored and with all my male relations in Italy for two long bitter years during World War II, it was time to research more. The pines are above the BSR, and the view takes in the Borghese Gardens.

Most strangely, and loveliest of all was the realisation that the Roman frescoes of Livia’s garden in the Museo Romano contain the very same pinkish blue light and foliage. Well, of course. Some things do not change, they are eternal.

Oil on board, 14” x12”
2018

2020. Oil on canvas 12”x10”

I have been my only live model for a year. My hair is rarely cut. For this year I have another identity. This is one of nine paintings made examining how I feel. But what do i feel? I'm so unaccustomed to entering a shop, I stand outside thinking I'm seeing my own life from a distance and might not be able to get back into it. I cannot imagine how I used to race around London.

oil on two boards 16” x 12” 2017

Anna  Ziman was a very old friend whom I knew when I was 17 in  Ponsonby, Auckland. She was an actress here In London all her life in this city and lived in Swaton Rd Bow where a row of small terrace houses were squatted in the 1970’s by artists.

She died last year of breast cancer but was formidable in how she braved it. She sat to me for several weeks in my studio while I made this and a companion piece. They do show how she suffered, but that is right.  We don’t want to see how difficult a terminal illness is to live with, we prefer an airbrushed face. I’m with John Donne: “Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

oil on linen 36” x 28” 2018

I make small studio installations to paint which include ephemera - from a photo found in a magazine, to tickets for a boat from Genoa to Cinque Terra. Or wrapping paper from the Horno de Sant Bonaventura, a wonderful cafe in the old Spanish style, in Seville, alas, now closed.

oil on linen 12” x 10” 2014

I‘m still very eager to read about the mind and brain. My neurosurgical nursing experience will never leave me. I had a tremendous job with the team at Auckland Public Hospital before I left for Peru. I owe them so much. These doctors treated us as equals. In my portraits I hope to capture the life of the mind. This friend is brilliant and brave, we talked as I worked, long conversations about politics, religion, Freud, and the mind.

oil on linen 14” x 12” 2018

oil on canvas 36” x 28” 2005

If you look at the gardens in Versailles you see how shells were brought there by the ton from all over the world. After three days roaming the gardens and thinking about the house, where the dogs wore silver collars saying they belonged to the king and were kept upstairs in a room… we returned to London. This painting became my own musing on exploration of the Pacific by the French, who were jealous of Cook, and the nature of ordered gardens and wild ones. I learnt to swim in Kaikoura and had every summer holiday there as a child playing on Jimmy Harmer beach and finding tiny fragments of paua, shining like jewels in dark sand.

oil on linen 36” x 28” 2016

These worn shoes were bought in a shop selling “Last year’s FS shoes”. They are hand made, the man told me, in a Naples bassi, the semi underground workshops you see in Naples as you walk around the town. Many high quality clothes and shoes there. I love the story line in “My Brilliant Friend “ by Ferrante where Lila and her brother secretly make a luxury high quality shoe, and the business of making beautiful shoes and a good living post war begins. The HBO adaptation is perfect. I always wanted to know, what did happen when the Kiwi soldiers went home? How did the Italians my father grew to love as a medical orderly, get on? He did help civilians with wounds and fractures. How did they rebuild Italy from terrible hardship, hunger and destruction? Through fashion, in part.

The dog I walk daily. This one was fast and could outrun most other dogs.

oil on linen 50” x 30” 2014

The MacKenzie Country with its once very remote shingle roads was a place I went through as a small child in the back seat of an old Vauxhall Velox, my parents adventurous and keen to see the mountains. They were always taking the long way round to get to Christchurch from Southland. I go back with my brother and his partner, he fishes and I paint. The feeling of return is overwhelming. There were times in London when i feared I would never see the mountains again. I even thought I should fresco the houses opposite me in the old, rough days in Nottinghill with the Southern Alps.

oil on linen 36” x 28” 2015

Looking across to the Orongorongos from Roseneath on a hot summer’s day. That curious linguistic melding of Maori and Scottish. Roseneath is in Edinburgh - and Wellington.

oil on board 30” x 18” 2017

“Quien no he visto Sevilla no he visto maravilla”

I have often visited Seville, leading 20 students from Chelsea School of Art, and Herts University, to deliver paintings for the annual contemporary art exhibition at The Hospital de Los Venerables Sacerdotes, supported by Focus Abengoa. One still life is in their permanent collection.

In the European mind, Seville holds a special imaginary, poetic place. Mozart set two operas there “The Marriage of Figaro” and “ Don Giovanni”. Rossini set “The Barber of Seville” there. Bizets “Carmen” is set in the 17th century Tabacalera, one of the first modern factories built in Europe which still stands with a beautiful facade.

Marius Petipa went and learnt the dances, the Sevillana, amongst many others which he used in his ballets. Do you remember “The Nutcracker?” The Duke of Montpensier danced dressed as a majo, and set up home in a palace, making flamenco fashionable and synonymous with Spain in minds the world over. Goya stayed with the Duchess of Alba at San Lucar de Barrameda on the Guadalquivir river mouth making sketchbook drawings.

When the Americas were “discovered” by Columbus, this city became a major European trade centre, rich and powerful. The architecture even now reflects this history. Customs and traditions are preserved, Semana Santa is a major, splendid event, which Sevillians prepare for all year around. Valuable polychrome wood sculptures are processed through the winding streets, saetas are sung from balconies, bands play tunes that Miles Davis borrowed. It is as they say, a wonder.

oil on linen 36” x 28” 2016

I am influenced by the Swiss painter Hodler. In 2014 I went to Basel to see a large exhibition of his work at the Beyeler Foundation which later travelled to New York. Hodler painted the Swiss mountains, often out in the cold.

I felt entirely at home back in the Alps. My childhood was spent on the roads in Fiordland. Often we were stuck in the Homer Tunnel which was still being built, with the sound of water dripping from the rocks above and the tap tapping of the men chiselling out the rock as we waited to go through. Or holidaying at Lake Manapouri or Lake Te Anau. Often we were snowed in. The country was as wild and remote as you can find.

oil on linen 50” x 30” 2017

Winter dog walking is only for the hardy. The mud and ice make you slither, it’s very, very cold at times and often the dark comes upon you speedliy. But the sight of the green parakeets flashing by against the winter red of the bramble, the clouds, the shining lights of the City beyond, the full moon rising, and the softness of dark December, keep you going.

oil on linen 50” x 30” 2018

Storm Doris was a wild winter storm which spun the trees outside and brought branches crashing down, yet the sky was often bright.

oil on canvas 14” x 10” 2015

oil on linen 14” x 12” 2017

Ever since a sojourn at the British School at Rome in 1993 (Abbey Award) on our way back to London we have stayed in this bay, swum, eaten in a modest fish restaurant at the back of the beautiful town, all painted with neoclassical and baroque facades, like being in a theatre set. The sea is the “wine dark sea” of Homer. The headland is rocky, you can swim to a platform in the bay - it is the world Katherine Mansfield wrote about, as she stayed in Ospedaletti on the Italian Riviera when ill with TB. It reminds me of Wellington and I know it did this for her as she records this familiar sense in her diaries. Ligurian fishermen emigrated to Wellington.

The bag is from a delicatessen in the town. Things to eat on the long road home.

oil on linen 30” x 24” 2018

For several months I read Zweig. I began with this book, about a cavalry officer riding out in the plains on the Austro Hungarian border. Zweig knew Sigmund Freud, and there is a very interesting chapter which seems to me to show Freud analysing the cavalryman in Vienna. I continued then to read “Magellan” his out of print account of Magellan’s voyage across the Pacific Ocean. This was written after his sea voyage to Brazil during WW2.

oil on board 24” x 34” 2016

I was given The Moritz - Heymann Residency by The Royal Drawing School and went in winter to Pignano, Tuscany where we lived in the artist’s house in an oak wood. At night owls hooted by the window and wild boar uprooted the land around the house, turning the earth over. In the winter light the skies were very blue and the persimmon trees had lost their leaves.

oil on canvas 40” x 30” 2005

Selected for the Adam Award at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pukenga Whakaata in 2015 and toured NZ.

Other works have been shown in the Adam Award including my portrait of Dr Lawrence Hogben DSO, who was one of the team who made the crucial D Day weather forecast. This was subsequently purchased by the gallery for its permanent collection.

oil on linen 50” x 30” 2017

In the Sforza Palace, Milan there is a room with a ceiling frescoed by Leonardo da Vinci. Dense interweaving foliage forms geometrical patterns. It is in a much better state of preservation than The Last Supper.

This fig tree is espaliered on a wall in our garden, and the Leonardo, plus the fresh newness of the fig leaves emerging in spring became a long subject. I come from a long line of gardeners. April clouds changed swiftly in the skies beyond. A vine runs through the picture.

oil on board 25” x 14” 2018

Exhibited in The Royal Academy Summer Show 2018.

The RA have made a folding card of the painting which is for sale worldwide.

oil on canvas 50” x 30” 2017

At this point Anna was on new chemo therapy to keep her going. The tumours had spread. She was indefatigable. If I suggested a walk she would stride along for miles, through woods, thickets, mud, in shoes with heels. She had terrific strength and would do a long day out followed by a night at the theatre. I admired her. She wanted to talk to me about our youth in Auckland. She was passionate about painting and very pleased to sit. We spent many long days working on the picture. Chiefly, I could see how ill she was from her hands.

oil on linen 50” x 30” 2016

Luisa Fazio is an Italian/Australian small leather goods designer, now working in New York for Coach/Kate Spade, having worked for Paul Smith, and Gucci in Florence.

oil on linen 10” x 12” 2017

oil on board 43” x 16” 2016

oil on linen 66” x 26” 2016-18

oil on linen 10” x 10” 2019

oil on linen 50” x 30” 2017

Grenfell Tower is near my studio. I could see it burning and it burnt for several days. Wherever you go in Ladbroke Grove or Notting Hill, you see it. The sadness and anger continue. It was unbearable and hurt so many people here. The churches, the mosque, and the Sikh temple were immediately active and did more than anyone to help – from 0300 on the day of the fire. People came from far and near to volunteer, and there was a great outpouring of kindness and support, but the scale of loss, and the mismanagement of the refurbishment continue to cause pain.

oil on linen 36” x 28” 2018.

This was painted outside in the Little Scrubs on a fine May day. I wanted to capture a very good year of May blossom. This varies hugely. Now, in 2019, it is thin, not thrilling, even patchy whereas the hawthorn was extremely lush and remained so for over two weeks. We all asked the Council to leave the park wild, and it is a success. We pick plums and blackberries in season and some of us make jam. I sit, hidden away, no easel, no gear, just a bag of paints a palette and brushes and work as hard as I can. The day wears on, light changes, birds sing, a fox goes past, a terrier gets lost chasing a fox, the owner calls and calls. It is lovely, you end up very hungry and often, even if it’s warm, cold.

oil on board, 40” x 13” 2016

Painting in Italy en plein air in winter can work. It wasn’t as cold as London. The workmen were building a wall. I try to imagine the troops coming through. Michael Oondatje’s book “The English Patient” (and the film) are a big influence on me.

I am bonded to trees. I grow them, try to save them, water them in my street when it is too dry, and pick up litter compulsively around them when I am out.

oil on recycled board 24” x 40” 2017

Flores could run like lightening. The English pointers made me love the landscape and live in it. I had felt I couldn’t paint England at all. They run in it and animate it. They drag you out in all weathers, and so you see much that you would have otherwise missed. Through my first dog I came to see the range of days, plant growth, change in season which was beforehand all unknown. There is nothing so fine as being out in the weather with your dog beside you.

oil on linen 12” x 10” 2018

oil on linen oval format 12” x 10” 2019

oil on board 12” x 10” 2019

Repainted again and again and again and again. Lost and found then lost again, endlessly changed. The infuriating task of catching an image, doing too much then scraping it off to try again. The shirt is by Margaret Howell and the influence is El Greco.

oil on linen 50” x 30” 2017

Nero was a handsome dog. The June days bring up umbellifers which make the Scrubs magical. It needs to be designated as a wild flower meadow, for that is what it is. The flowers rise as tall as the humans and the dogs love to leap through them. The weather can be capricious.

oil on linen 50” x 30” 1990-2017

This was painted over many years. It was the view of a kind of internal courtyard from high up in Ladbroke Grove from a roofgarden we built. The children grew up there, we established a luxuriant garden where a blackbird nested in a flower pot. Later I put images of the children into the picture as to me, they were always present in the view, and any kind of grounding was irrelevant, they just continue to exist in my mind, superimposed on the place, and will, as long as I live.

oil on linen 12” x 10” 2017

oil on linen 12” x 10” 2017

oil on linen 36” x 28” 2017

oil on linen 50” x 30” 2017

Flores my orange English Pointer in the wild marshy ground, full of vetch, dog roses, buttercups, umbellifers, bees and butterflies. I made a series of big paintings to try to help save the Scrubs, and keep it wild for all the people who live nearby and love to walk there. It feels as though you have been in the country when you step out onto the road after an hour or two walking in the wilderness. The clouds are magnificent there too, though the ground is not high. The Emperor Hadrian was said to have invaded England because he fell in love with the clouds.

12” x10”

Oil on board