The very personal nature of Susan Wilson's art stems from its unique blend of observation and memory. Until recently, she has always worked directly from nature; and yet the figures, objects and landscapes in her paintings are charged with associations and emotions that resonate through time. This is the basis of a strong underlying affinity between the artist and the author Katherine Mansfield, whose brilliant short stories she has just illustrated for the Folio Society. Like Mansfield, Susan Wilson was born and raised in New Zealand, and for both women, memories of their native land became a potent parallel of experience which haunts and sometimes overwhelms their sense of present time. The colonial mansions and windswept coastal towns which Mansfield evokes so vividly in her stories were part of a world the artist's mother knew, and which she herself revisited on outings with her father to grand, decaying estates in remote areas of the South Island.

'Prelude' Oil on Canvas. One of the illustrations for a book of short stories by Katherine Mansfield

The essence of New Zealand, in Susan Wilson's imagination, remains in powerful, almost dream-like impressions of nature, which resurface, for example, in her painting illustrating Mansfield's story entitled Prelude. Here we find that strange combination of almost comic realism and vision that characterises Susan Wilson's art. In the foreground, a group of children, like tiny caricatures, are frolicking in the garden, while behind them the landscape mounts in increasingly wild and exotic bands towards a blood-red sky. The image was informed, the artist explains, by memories of playing outside on those long summer evenings which, as children, we all believe will never end. The garden of her family house had no fence or barrier separating it from the surrounding wilderness, and such evenings are associated in the artist's mind with the most potent sensations of freedom. Still Life Signorelli 1997 - 36"x28" Oil on Canvas In a certain way, Susan Wilson has disregarded boundaries in art as well as nature, eager to explore a realm of figuration where many other British artists have feared to tread. The puritanical, deadly serious approach to realism of the Euston Road artists, who dominated the Camberwell School of Art where she first studies, was counterbalanced by her passionate interest in a range of painters - including the Belgian Symbolist, James Ensor and, above all, the Spanish artists of the Golden Age - for whom realism was a means of expression rather than an end in itself. What interested Susan Wilson were the psychological and emotional resonances of the experienced world, and in the eighties she began to explore this in a series of haunting still-life paintings, which were inspired by the lockers placed alongside hospital beds. During a period when she trained and worked as a nurse in New Zealand, she had tidied and arranged these lockers, aware that they were the only means the patients had of retaining a sense of their personal lives. The small surfaces crowded with cards, bottles and photographs appeared to her like portraits of the people she had helped to nurse, or even shrinescommemorating a life. The shadow of death often brushes past Susan Wilson's work, but this coexists with her extraordinarily vital celebration of life. The wonderfully sensuous, sunlit landscapes she painted around the Italian town of Cassino, nevertheless recall the thousands of young soldiers who lost their lives there during World War Two, the ancient monastry that was destroyed, and her own father's humble heroism as a medical orderly in the mist of the battle. Correspondingly, there is nothing heroic or rhetorical about Susan Wilson's painterly affirmation of life. It is present, above all, in the creative energy that pulses through her drawings and paintings, bearing witness to the intensity of her memories and allowing her to forge a living bond between past and present time. Jill Lloyd, July 2000 Art Historian and Writer

'Celestial Light' 1998 - 50"x30" Oil on Canvas' 'Cosima' 1995 - Indian Ink on Paper

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