Susie Stone | Ensemble

While Ensemble represents a major step forward, it is worth taking a moment to look back and remind ourselves of the fundamentals that shape Susie’s creative outlook. Ensemble draws together a wide variety of strands that make for a fascinating artistic hinterland. The seminal influence of fashion illustrators such as Antonio Lopez, René Gruau and David Downton provide Susie with a bedrock in terms of presentation and composition. Fashion photographers such as Horst P. Horst, Bill Cunningham, Patrick Demarchelier and Helmut Newton provide touchstones in terms of aesthetic and a certain attitude. These precedents are to be expected for an artist with her previous career in couture, however wider reference points can be found in the work of painters such as Alex Katz, Humphrey Ocean, David Hockney, Julian Opie, the vibrant palette of Lee Krasner and the aesthetic standpoint of the Bloomsbury Group. Personally, I find the resonance with the eighteenth century woodcuts of Kitagawa Utamaro in the tradition of Bijin Ōkubi-e (literally, large-headed pictures of beautiful women) particularly interesting and is a reminder that Susie’s work can take us down sometimes unexpected paths (and is all the better for it). This varied intellectual topography is however unified by the core formal concerns of Susie’s work: the compression of pictorial space, the distillation (not to be confused with simplification) of compositional elements and a sophisticated use of colour. This rigorous visual underpinning gives Ensemble a coherence that Susie asserts with a clarity that is rapidly becoming a hallmark.

Susie has pushed her painting practice since we last encountered her work. There is a more varied palette at play here and it is deployed in the creation of larger, bolder statement pieces. Scale is an interesting creative challenge and Susie meets it well, particularly in works such as Green Suit and Dinner Date. A relish for painted texture, seen in the broken brush marks of works such as Sky Coat and Sunday Stroll are a satisfying development and playfully subvert the crisp, sleek surfaces of paintings that we have been familiar with to date. This pushing at the formal boundaries of her work suggests an artist that is growing in confidence having taken the gamble to return to fine art after a successful career in fashion, and it is a pleasure to display the evidence of this here in the gallery.

Another departure for Susie is her depiction of figures in pairs and groups which is a break from the single-figure solitude of her previous work. This not only allows Susie to explore more complex compositions but is also a welcome reminder that, as the world turns, we are now able to meet up again, reconnect in each other’s company and dress up to show off. Fashion is a common language that we can enjoy with our ‘tribe’ and if works like Connections and Tea Dress Trio are interpreted by visitors to this exhibition as gentle celebrations of the fact that we might be finally, albeit cautiously, emerging from the torments of the last two years, Susie Stone, an artist who has conducted her fledgling career exclusively in lockdown, would be only too delighted. A sentiment that we can all agree with, surely?

Vincent Eames, March 2022