About Susan Cartwright
Biography
I have expressed myself through art for as long as I can remember, from childhood drawings to drawing, painting and working with fibre and fabric as an adult. Three years ago, I discovered printmaking, realized I had found "my" medium, and have now made it my focus.
I delight in and marvel at both the natural and built environments around me and I want to share my interpretations of them with others, through my prints.
I spend half my time on an old farmstead, on the banks of a canal, where I have my studio. Here, the natural world furnishes an endless source of inspiration in the colours, textures, patterns and light in the animals, birds, trees and flowers, and the landscape, around me. I have a particular affinity for the beautiful local limestone and granite, which lie on, and just below, the surface in this part of the Ottawa Valley. How difficult it must have been for the early generations to wrest grazing and crops from this land and how they must have despaired at something in which I now find great beauty.
The other half of my time is spent in an urban environment, where I am particularly drawn to disused, downtrodden and "lost" buildings and structures as subjects for my printmaking. Part of my motivation is the preservation of a record of the built environment before it is replaced with buildings that, to me at least, appear more transient and to have less character.
I have been lucky to have travelled extensively and have lived outside Canada for 25 years, and so quite different landscapes and other subjects are also a source of ideas and images in my prints. But what draws me to these subjects are the same entrancing elements of colour, texture and light.
Printmaking and my journey so far as a printmaker have brought enormous joy and fulfillment to me. I enjoy the process of creating prints and its traditions (although they don't stop me from experimenting!). I am fascinated by what I call the "alchemy of the press", the fact that I am never entirely sure what I will find until I peel the paper away from the matrix and view the print for the first time. Printmaking also offers many collaborative opportunities and many of us work in shared studios. There is a camaeraderie in printmaking through which I have learnt a tremendous amount.
I am also very keen to share my growing knowledge of, and an appreciation for, fine art prints and the processes by which they are created.
I delight in and marvel at both the natural and built environments around me and I want to share my interpretations of them with others, through my prints.
I spend half my time on an old farmstead, on the banks of a canal, where I have my studio. Here, the natural world furnishes an endless source of inspiration in the colours, textures, patterns and light in the animals, birds, trees and flowers, and the landscape, around me. I have a particular affinity for the beautiful local limestone and granite, which lie on, and just below, the surface in this part of the Ottawa Valley. How difficult it must have been for the early generations to wrest grazing and crops from this land and how they must have despaired at something in which I now find great beauty.
The other half of my time is spent in an urban environment, where I am particularly drawn to disused, downtrodden and "lost" buildings and structures as subjects for my printmaking. Part of my motivation is the preservation of a record of the built environment before it is replaced with buildings that, to me at least, appear more transient and to have less character.
I have been lucky to have travelled extensively and have lived outside Canada for 25 years, and so quite different landscapes and other subjects are also a source of ideas and images in my prints. But what draws me to these subjects are the same entrancing elements of colour, texture and light.
Printmaking and my journey so far as a printmaker have brought enormous joy and fulfillment to me. I enjoy the process of creating prints and its traditions (although they don't stop me from experimenting!). I am fascinated by what I call the "alchemy of the press", the fact that I am never entirely sure what I will find until I peel the paper away from the matrix and view the print for the first time. Printmaking also offers many collaborative opportunities and many of us work in shared studios. There is a camaeraderie in printmaking through which I have learnt a tremendous amount.
I am also very keen to share my growing knowledge of, and an appreciation for, fine art prints and the processes by which they are created.
