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 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 coming up this autumn in Hampstead.
Susan’s work centres on varying abstract drawings on paper, which she has formed into categories (Perspex, Ephemeral, Foldings, Molluscs, Sculptural, Surreal, Triangles). She uses graphite, black ink, gold marker or pencil and white or cream pastel 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, 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. At present her abstract pictures use minimal colour although she hopes to use some colour in the future. She has also started on a series of cut-out pictures which are not yet being shown.
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 6th Form College and later running her own private practice.
