About Susan Ashworth
Susan Ashworth was born on the Isle of Portland in Dorset and grew up in a landscape of stone quarries, cliffs and wide views across field and scrub to open sea. Having studied Fine Art in Falmouth, Cornwall, she has continued to live on the South Coast, seeking out its remoter corners and open spaces for her work.
Long walks taking photos provide starting points for landscape paintings which emphasise both the empty quality of our managed countryside and our dislocated perception of it. Shadows across a field, a lighthouse on a concrete jetty, an uncertain skyline through bare branches all appear glimpsed from a speeding train or shot from a panning camera: improvised reminders of the twenty-first century experience of seeing.
The current still lifes share certain elements with the tabletop images of Diebenkorn, Nicholson and Letinsky. They are also, in essence, landscapes: oblique light picking out objects effectively dwarfed in expanses of empty space. Whether a lemon, a half-empty tea-cup or fishbones on a plate, what we see are familiar items estranged then seen afresh.
As one observer has noted, all the paintings are subtly elegiac in their suggestion of what is missing - a human presence that has just passed out of view.
The handling of the paint in Susan Ashworth’s work explores the play between the flat surface and the illusion of depth. All kinds of process - simultaneous work on different paintings, widely varied consistencies and applications of paint, rotation of the surface being worked, layering, sanding and scraping - allow accident to play its part, ‘letting the paint do the work!’
These paintings catch the instant of seeing before the brain categorises what is exposed to the eye. Without fuss or fanfare, they renew for us the surprise of seeing.
Jamie Crawford June 2008
Represented by:
Morgan Boyce Contemporary Fine Art, Marlborough
