Susie Dureau

Susie Dureau’s oil paintings, spectrogram collages and light installations are portals into worlds where reality and imagination merge. Her artworks are landscape-based although they invite non-literal interpretations about the unseen forces that bind humankind into entangled relationships with the more-than-human world. Susie asks us to ‘feel’ as a way of thinking, by using our primary experience of the natural world as a guide.

Susie uses traditional oil paints on stretched linen, which she prepares herself. “Linseed oil and linen come from the same fast-growing, sustainable flax plant and the pigments come from the earth. Everything you need to make an oil painting can be harvested from a plant growing in a patch of dirt,” she says. “Such considerations are important to me when I think about the landscape and how we share existence – I want my materials to reflect my rationale”.

Preparing a canvas can take up to four months, with several layers of coloured priming, building an optical complexity in the ground. “My practice relies upon centuries-old Western painting techniques and owes a great deal to painters of the past. I tend to work on a series of artworks at once. There are always conversations going on between the paintings and me.”

Susie lives and works on Garigal and Gayamaygal land, Eora Nation, Sydney, Australia. She has been a finalist in many prestigious awards including the Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olly Art Centre Nancy Fairfax (AIR) Award, Mosman Art Prize, Calleen Art Award, Paddington Art Prize, Albany Art Prize & Ravenswood Art Prize in Australia, and the Agora Gallery International Art Prize, in New York. In 2021 Susie completed her Master of Fine Arts, at the National Art School, Sydney, and holds a Bachelor of Design Hons (Visual Communications) from the University of Technology, Sydney.

Photo credit: Katie Holmes