Untitled

Suzanne Partidge

Suzanne Partidge uses paint both as her subject and her medium. She works in an intensely physical way with oil, acrylic, hammerite, and enamel paints, on board or canvas, “both surfaces give different challenges”. Faced with a white canvas she will “obliterate it, building up marks and layers”. She trowels the paint on; drips, smears, spreads it; scrapes it off; sands it down, and works back into again, “with plasterer’s trowels right down to tiny brushes”. She selects colours according to her mood and from that selection knows how the painting will go. Gradually she calms and tames this swirling, heaving mass of powerful colour and, “builds a relationship with the painting”, until it represents the memory of the emotions and thoughts which she experienced while she was making it. She chooses deliberately enigmatic titles which leave the viewer free to make their own response.

Her studio looks like a battle ground and out of this she creates order. Only when she is completely satisfied with the colour, composition and the resolution of her ideas does she feel that the painting is finished. “If it works as a painting you know you have put your life and soul into it.” The battle is not only with her materials it is with herself as well. However despite her explosive working method, ultimately she is searching for peace and quiet. She chooses village over city living because “cities assault you with their noise and advertising hoardings”.

Partridge is conscious of the balance between the destructive and the creative and the importance of destroying something in order to create something better. She does not rely on preparatory drawings but works totally in response to the paint. “I like paint to do its own thing.” She sees drawing and painting “as two completely different disciplines”.

She is inspired by the graffiti artist Banksy, the drawings of Gerhard Richter and the Berlin wall. She was overwhelmed by her response to a “tiny quiet painting” by Gwen John, in an exhibition at Tate Britain. It was “not my palette, not what I would do. Maybe that’s why I liked it so much”.

Suzanne Partridge uses the word chaos a lot. The untidiness she sees all around her provides source material for her art. Recently she has started to take photos and make drawings of the “random arrangement” of toys abandoned by her children at the end of the day. “I need to record it because it’s not going to last forever.”
It is this ephemeral quality which Partridges captures in her paintings because once she gets to the end of a painting she knows she couldn’t possibly do the same thing again.