Susan Brandt – Artist
Biography & Artist’s Statement
Susan Brandt is an emerging artist with no formal training in art, although her father, Rolf Brandt, was an artist and teacher. Inspired by a box of Perspex which belonged to her father, she is influenced by Ben Nicholson, Fernand Léger, Naum Gabo, as well as the Bauhaus and the Picasso works, she used to see at the Chateau Grimaldi in Antibes; Hans Arp, Victor Vasarely and Paul Klee have also had a major impact.
She was brought up surrounded by art and early visual influences were her father’s surrealistic book-illustrations of the 1940s as well as his powerful later (1950s & 60s) paintings and constructions. She has been making her own pictures since the late 1980s but was only recently persuaded to sell her work, with an exhibition at the Avivson Gallery in Highgate in London, another promised at the Artree gallery near Basel, Switzerland, and one still showing at Amberdens, South Hill Park, Hampstead.
Susan’s work centres on varying abstract drawings on paper, which she has formed into categories (Perspex, Ephemeral, Foldings, Molluscs, Sculptural, Surreal, Triangles, and Insects). She uses graphite, black ink, gold marker or pencil and white or cream pastel, with the latest ones in coloured pastels. These are on different types of coloured or textured papers. Some are delicate and simple, others of heavier form and complex. She depicts cubes or semi-transparent outlines and Perspex with various shapes, all completely hand-drawn and invented in her imagination, with circular and mollusc-like forms flowing through them to show the fluidity of life, the extraordinary geometry of minerals in natural elements, as well as imaginary insects, combining Nature’s precision with seeming chaos.
She is interested in relationships between different forms, light and shade, structure, surface, shape, and texture. Susan tries to show the movement within and around objects and ostensibly static matter. Her abstract pictures were using minimal colour, but she is starting to use colour now.
Susan has also had her Young Teen novel, "Kim's Promise" published recently. Although "Kim's Promise" is a novel from age eleven on it is mildly influenced by fairy tales and the wonderful eastern stories of Idries Shah, which Susan used to read to her children.
Prince Kim, aged 15, promises his dying mother to find the unknown kitchen boy who overheard a terrible family quarrel and a secret curse. He travels incognito, while his father, the king, sends soldiers to stop him. After being left for dead by bandits, Kim meets with a wise old man living on a mountain and later a kind herbalist who helps him find the kitchen boy. But once found, things are not as simple as they should be.
Meanwhile, Kim’s childhood sweetheart, Princess Sagesse is ill with the threat of a marriage to her mother’s choice of husband if Kim does not finish his task in time.
"Kim's Promise" is tale of mystery and adventure, of fear and generosity, of contamination and survival.
Susan has also written plays and screenplays as well as a 1992 travel memoir. (See "WRITING WORK", here)
Susan lives in London and has a daughter and a son. Previously, she spent years working as the head of a Dyslexic Unit at a sixth Form College and later running her own private practice.
