Close up, the painting’s foreground surface is pale grey and white, applied in thick creamy slabs. Irregular bands, formed by pink, purple and green flecks, recede upwards towards a high horizontal line. On this line, lilac and grey angular shapes are silhouetted against a smooth blue, scraped vertically to the top edge of a 24” by 36” board.
Step back and the scene is made explicit – a collection of abandoned and roofless farm buildings on Skomer stand tall against the sky, a field of bluebells before them, dropping to broken down stone walls. It is warm, sunny and still round the haunting relics of a lost way of life.
“ Farmhouse on Skomer” , an acrylic painting, by Susan (nee Pomery) Wilks, is one of a hundred or so such works completed by this Pembrokeshire artist in the last year. Typically it was one of those she has simply given away to a friend.
Sue, brought up in Falmouth, Cornwall, was the daughter of a gifted amateur artist and unconsciously absorbed the principles of perspective, recession and colour long before any formal art tuition. Aged 15 Sue declared her career intention, to be an artist. Despite strenuous protestation from her teachers, Sue’s father insisted she must learn a trade.
Training as a State Enrolled Nurse, Sue continued painting and sold, and gave, her watercolours and oil paintings to friends and colleagues. She was awarded ‘Student of the Year’ and moved to Bristol to qualify as an SRN and RMN. Six years of nursing followed before Sue married and went to live in Toulouse, France, where her husband Tim worked on the French Concorde project. Ill health forced her return to England just two years later however.
It was after the birth of her second daughter that Sue had her first experience of Pembrokeshire. The young family was coming to live here
where Tim had new work. The journey was horrendous and the county veiled by drizzle and darkness, an inauspicious start to a deep love for the surrounding coast and countryside.
The family lived in Orange Gardens in Pembroke for 10 years, the girls attending local schools and Tim working at the power station, and later at Texaco. Sue painted for herself when she had time, and joined local art classes, doing life drawing. Her nagging feeling of having missed out, of wanting to be more involved with art continued and grew stronger. It was not an interest in the commercial aspects of art but a need to fulfil her earlier declaration that she would be an artist that led to a new life.
At age 50, now settled in her present home outside Pembroke, with her daughters having finished university, Sue felt able to take up art study seriously. With her family’s encouragement she enrolled at Carmarthen College of Art and Design, firstly taking an Access course since she had no formal school qualifications, then embarking on a Sculpture degree course of a further two years.
Sue remembers particularly the late Brian Jones, one of her tutors who produced the most delicate of flower paintings himself, who taught painting and helped Sue make an important shift in her work. When Sue started Sculpture, Andy Griffiths and Paul Roach were significant figures. In addition to Peter Bodenham’s tutoring in the History of Art, Sue also attended Arthur Giardelli’s classes at the Golden Plover Studio and engaged with other local art groups.
In her first year in Sculpture Sue was taught the creative possibilities of clay, plaster, stone, metal, glass-fibre resin and ‘found objects’ to mould carve, cast, fire, weld and otherwise make. She particularly enjoyed working alongside others of like mind and recalls her contemporary’s final pieces as easily as her own. Sue herself had found a preference for the sensual qualities of clay, and an ability to catch likenesses of people. Combining these two factors, and resisting the push towards conceptual art, she focussed on her final dissertation entitled “Ahead of my times.” She made 30 pieces, in 2- and 3-d, of heads in a variety of media, with such titles as Headstart, Heads and Tails, Red Head etc. which were exhibited at the final show in Carmarthen, and subsequently at the Dockside Gallery, Milford Haven.
After graduating, Sue assessed her relative levels of enjoyment during her time at college, “three years of challenge and experience never to be forgotten”, and returned to her first love, painting, with new-found desire and a new depth of understanding. Now she works in her studio, self-contained at the side of her house, for three-hour stints, sustained by classical music and maybe a glass of wine. Here she is surrounded by stacks of books about artists, and has one easel set up for acrylic work, and another for watercolour at the other end of the studio. She is overlooked by a life-sized self-portrait. Recently completed paintings lean against a wall, others are stored in a large cupboard – she has always kept all her work and has no idea how many paintings she has produced in her life.
In her house and garden is overwhelming evidence of Sue’s abiding interests: family photographs are displayed next to twig and ink drawings of nudes; Sue’s paintings – landscapes, portraits, still-lifes, are exhibited with the work of other artists she admires; a collection of pots is gathered on the hearth; masks hang on the wall and outside, in the grass, stone figures crouch. As in the studio there are more piles of books on the artists who have influenced her. Sue talks of them – “Picasso, painter, sculptor and ceramicist, Turner, who went so far beyond mere representation of the subject, Rodin, who used his hands directly to create strong enlivened images, and Van Gogh, of course, for his impassioned impasto.” Of modern artists Sue appreciates the openness and vulnerability of Lucien Freud’s subjects, the landscapes of Kyffin Williams and Gwilym Pritchard, and the later work of David Tress and, in Cornwall, that of Kurt Jackson.
Sue works very quickly. “I have an idea in my mind and start with drawing very basic compositions, playing with different horizon levels, deciding on tonal values. I use my memory of a place and how it felt, refer to sketches done on the spot and photographs. I rarely mix colours, preferring to scoop two or three pure acrylic colours straight from the tub, and making the viewer’s eyes do the work.”
The freedom of pallet knife and impasto was one Sue found at college when trying to work in a less restricted way and is now her preferred method of painting. The paint’s thick quality retains the marks of the knife’s movements across the painting, or may be scraped down to reveal other layers of colour beneath, or be applied in dabs, flicks, slabs and swathes to represent foliage, waves, rocks. Sue paints from top to bottom, capturing with swift surety her chosen subject before she has the chance to get tired and bored with it. “Not for me days and weeks on one painting…”
Sue’s subject matter is all around her. It’s predominantly the place where she lives, the land and sea, constantly changing with the light and hour and season. South Pembrokeshire, the dunes, rocks, sands and cliffs of the coast, and woods, fields and isolated buildings of the land, is what is in Sue’s mind. She sifts through memories, ideas, and feelings, imagines colours and textures. People who have a strong preference for representational work may find that Sue’s which, although inspired by and recognizably remaining a particular landscape, verges on abstraction through its strong surface texture and use of colour. There’s no message here: Sue only wants to paint, and paint what she loves, and imbue her work with the excitement she feels for the subject.
Sue does not thin the paint, nor use a retardent to extend its workability. The three hour stint usually results in a whole painting being completed and only occasionally will Sue make minor changes on reviewing it the next day. Whilst painting Sue must feel passionate and emotionally connected. “There’s a high level of involvement with the work, a huge buzz when I’m lost to the world, painting in private.” But when it’s finished there is little sentimental attachment - she is already starting to think of the next one.