It has been almost a year since Susie Stone's last exhibition at Eames Fine Art, Finding the Line, and in that time she's been deep in a period of experimentation in her studio.
Her Collectors' Studio Showcase on a Saturday morning in September offered us a rare chance to see that process up close – to view where Susie’s work stands right now, still taking shape, ahead of her new exhibition at Eames Fine Art next spring.
As Vincent Eames put it to the room, this wasn't quite like Susie's previous talks with us. "We're in slightly uncharted territory," he said, "because, with this showcase we're actually in between shows."
What followed was less a tour of finished work than a conversation about how an established artist gives herself permission to start again.
From silkscreen to linocut
For four shows, Susie's work has combined painting with hand-painted silkscreen prints, made in collaboration with a master printmaking studio in Whitstable. This time, she wanted something she could make entirely on her own terms. "I just really wanted to do something that was in my own studio, that I had total kind of agency and control over," she told Vincent – lino cutting, a discipline she first tried on her Fine Art degree but hadn't returned to since.
The shift, as she describes it, has meant refocusing on the line and the power of simplifying an image to its essence. She works in soft-cut lino rather than wood or hard lino, which lets her keep the same fluid, illustrative quality she brings to a sketch. And rather than sending the blocks through a press, every print is hand-burnished by Susie herself, which means no two are quite the same.
She's become, in her words, "a proper paper nerd," testing bright white, eggshell and cream stock in different weights and textures until each print takes on its own character.
Susie was candid that the results aren't – and aren't meant to be – perfect, and she was unflustered by that. "I've learnt to be okay with the unpredictability of printmaking, even to the point where I might look at something and think 'Oh, that was a disaster!' but that's ok. It's just a day in my studio where something didn't work out and I can learn from that." But she says that this attitude has taken months to arrive at – but she's there now.
That unpredictability is central to the appeal: after painstakingly carving a block, printing it becomes a single moment of reveal she can't fully control. "You don't have the control – it's just what it is at the end," she said, with the ease of someone who's made peace with the process rather than fighting it.
Drawing, urgency and colour
Alongside the prints, Susie has been drawing extensively in oil pastel – a medium she chose partly because it gave her back the colour she'd set aside for the linocuts, and partly because, as she put it, "You really have to commit to the line. You can't rub it out or make corrections - in oil pastel every mark counts so I have to bold." Each mark carries small pockets of layered colour that only reveal themselves up close – something Vincent encouraged the room to notice, urging people to view the drawings first from a distance, then close in.
For Susie, the immediacy of these drawings echoes the urgency of her years sketching quickly in front of a client during her time as a couturier – a skill she now wields with total confidence. It's a connection she traced back further still, telling Vincent that everything – the paintings, the prints, the drawings – starts in the same place: "it all starts from the line, the sketch, the pose, and builds from there in different directions." These sketches are genuinely one-off works, and Susie has agreed to make them available to buy over the course of the showcase for the first time.
Five brand new paintings rounded out the showcase – stylish, vibrant and utterly cool, and never before shown. Susie described her current mood as "graphic and punchy" – bold colour, bold blocks of background, a directness she feels is filtering back into the paintings from her work with lino and line. They're some of her finest work to date, and available exclusively through the Eames Studio.
Giving herself permission
What came through most clearly in the conversation was how far Susie has come in trusting herself to make this leap at all. She's candid that it took a real act of will – "I think generally I'm quite a perfectionist," she admitted, "and I've been in a real mode of allowing myself the permission to say 'I don't know what I'm going to show you next.'"
But six years into her practice with Eames, Susie now moves between disciplines: a bit of linocutting; then because she’s missing colour, a bit of drawing; then painting when she wants solid ground again, in what she called "a kind of circular practice" – with the sureness of an artist who knows exactly what she's capable of, even when she's deliberately stepping into the unknown.
“I feel like I understand my own skills and strengths now” and it's that quiet certainty that gives her the confidence to experiment so boldly elsewhere.
What's next
Susie's own reflection, looking back over the last nine months, was that Finding the Line turned out to be a rather prophetic title for a show that came before all of this. Everything on display in the Collectors' Studio – lino, drawing, painting – still starts, she said, in exactly the same place.
The linocuts, oil pastel sketches and new paintings shown at the Studio Showcase are available to buy now, but only until the showcase closes next week. Any pieces not snapped up by then will be included in Susie's full exhibition at Eames Fine Art next spring – so if you miss them this time, you'll have to wait, and be quick when the show opens. For a rare, unfiltered look at where a confident and quietly fearless artist is heading next, this is the moment to see it – and to collect it – first.
See the full showcase online HERE.