Susan Isaac – Paintings & Sculpture

Susan Isaac is a Cardiff born artist, now based in Nottinghamshire. The common thread in her work is an “endeavour to capture the spirit of things or places I have known, to seek to illuminate aspects of the world that have captured my imagination – to evoke feeling”.

Susan paints mostly in oils in a loose figurative style which occasionally dissolves into the abstract elements of her compositions, combining strong drawing skills with bold use of colour and application of texture. Her subjects are mainly towns and seascapes. She loves the insistent repetitive textures of the built environment contrasting with the gentle rhythms of nature. Her coastal depictions and harbour scenes are a transposition of childhood memory onto current day experiences.

Alongside this, many of her ceramic sculptures are a fusion of human and landscape forms. Hand-built stoneware geomorphic heads, referencing the mining landscapes of her birthplace, are enhanced using a variety of glazes and stains and are often wood fired to produce exciting and contrasting surfaces.

Her work has won several awards including 1^st Prize Oil Painting Category Paint Out Norfolk at the Sainsbury Centre (2019), 1^st Prize Nocturne Category Paint Out Norwich (2018), the International Festival Choice in the Buxton Spa Prize Open Art Competition (2017), the Thoresby Open First Prize (2017), the 1851 Prize at the Oxford Open plein air competition (2015), the Wilson Browne prize at the Leicester Open26 Exhibition (2015) and the Winsor & Newton Award at Patchings in 2015. She was also exhibition prize winner of the Thoresby Open Exhibition in 2011 and 2015, and won the Tony Wilkinson prize as part of the Thoresby 2011 open. She has twice been shortlisted (2019 & 2017) for the Sir John Hurt Art Prize (part of the Holt Festival).

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