Susan has had a long and varied career since leaving South East Essex Technical College in 1976. She began her career with a fashion company in London as an illustrator, moving in 1980 to a merchandising company specialising in t-shirt printing for the music and fashion industry, where she worked in the design studio.
Her freelance career, started in 1986 and since then Susan has worked on numerous projects from illustrations and portraits to murals but has always retained her passion for figurative work and portrait miniatures in particular.
She studied the practical technique of painting portrait miniatures with David Bartlett, Honorary President of the Royal Miniature Society and continues to research the techniques of Holbein, Hilliard and Issac Oliver.
In 1996 she moved from Essex to North Yorkshire and did a degree in graphics and in 2007 received a PGCE from Huddersfield University which enabled her to teach. She taught art for North Yorkshire County Council and Leeds City College until 2012. Since then she has tutored private classes in and around the local area.
In 2011 she was featured in a BBC2 documentary 'Jane Austen: the unseen portrait?' where she was asked to draw a ‘plumbago’ portrait of the presenter.
2017 saw Susan working with Penguin/Random House and The Ministry of Stories as a volunteer illustrator on a collaborative project with children from an east London school. The children wrote their own stories and illustrators were selected to illustrate them. It was lovely to work with my ‘allotted’ child and work with her on her ideas for her story.
Her love of history and her passion for portraiture, has led to continuing research into traditional Renaissance painting techniques with Dr David Cranswick which continues to influence her work.
2018 Attended Royal Academy of Arts drawing school.
EXHIBITIONS
1985. Harrods
1989, 1990, 1991 The Royal Society of Miniature Painters, Sculptors and Gravers, London
1991. Essex Chamber of Commerce, for the Prince’s Trust, Cressing Temple, Colchester, Essex
1993 The Medici Gallery, Dover Street, London
1994. Llewellyn Alexander Gallery, London
1996 Royal Armouries, Leeds
2023. The Royal Society of Miniature Painters, Sculptors and Gravers, Bankside Gallery, London