Looking back, Susannah Curtis sees that she has always done it. Even as a child, she scanned
the faces of her loved ones, seeking an essential connection she did not find on the surface.
Susannah did not physically resemble her adoptive family. She had to look more deeply into
their beings to find herself reflected. And this she did.
It takes skill and rigour for an artist to achieve the true likenesses that Susannah captures in
her portraits. A portrait painted in a traditional style either looks right or it looks wrong.
There is no hiding. Once embarked on, there is no way out. Each time Susannah takes on the
exacting challenge that is classical portraiture she must push through a period of despondency
and sometimes despair to come out the other side. It is not the external act of painting that is
important. What is important is that Susannah has mastered the art of not giving up.
That is the grit, but it is not the heart of Susannah’s practice. The essential quality of her
approach is the loving intensity of her gaze. She cannot fake it. She must therefore be careful
who she agrees to paint. She must sit quietly in her studio and bring herself into a loving state
of being before she tentatively makes her first marks. She is not a person to rush relationships
or paintings. She is cautious, careful, tender and endlessly attentive.
As Susannah realises a portrait, she herself is realised. Her subject is her mirror. Even with no
physical resemblance - unless she is painting her children or herself - she is able to see herself
reflected in the other, as she did as a child. This is partly why her work is so alive and
spirited. It contains not just traces of the energy of a binary self and other, but the ether of
them interacting to bring recognition, connection and even a sense of belonging.
Susannah has painted four of my family members so far. When I gaze at the paintings, each
one more extraordinary than the last, I am reminded that if we have not love, we are nothi