About Susannah

I’ve lived for many years in the great landscapes of Herefordshire, Shropshire and the Welsh Marches, also by the coast in Pembrokeshire. These beautiful areas have constantly influenced my work.

I studied classical drawing and painting in an atelier in Florence for over two years. My time at Studio Cecil Graves was extremely exacting, working with the sight size technique used by the old masters, and learning about tone before colour.

On return to England, I concentrated primarily on still life painting, and portrait commissions.

Over time, I became more interested in painting the wilder places of the British isles, and sometimes her creatures. Especially those who have become marginalised by us, whose intricacies or vulnerabilities are too often overlooked in our 'tidying up’ to suit our purpose.

More recently, I have been working on land and waterscapes, rocks, stones, and the miraculous potential of seeds. Pared down to simplified form.

I have gradually developed my painting and slowly changed the way I use paint, I work dryer, with no extra medium, in a more immediate, visceral way. An increasingly intuitive relationship with nature creates spontaneity and sometimes satisfying accidental successes.

I build up the feeling I want in mixed media, leaving something of the original dark ground showing though, and working up to the brightest lights, the use of jewel colours nearer the end gives a feeling of air and luminosity to my paintings, allowing them to breathe.

The sea is an ever present draw. I‘m able to spend hours beside it, watching it’s ever changing moods and light. Water and earth, the two elements enhance one another, the land is enriched when water moves against the earth. The sea is at once, raw, energising and poetic. A place where man made things fall away, the primeval prevails, nature becomes a meditation and peace can be found.

How do you paint this onto a piece of board? You can’t, but the strength of the journey of love and respect to get you to the moment of desperation of expression has a power and validity all of it’s own, and it is that I endeavour to offer you in my work on this website.

See Exhibitions

The artist Susannah Royle Lester at work