Suzanne Osborne
Suzanne Osborne was born and grew up in Lincolnshire, England. Having embarked on the Foundation Course, at Grimsby School Of Art, before moving to London to further study at the Slade School, UCL. There, she benefitted greatly from tutorial visits with the painter Paula Rego. After graduating, with a subsidiary subject of anatomy, she concentrated upon still-life (usually with an unexpected twist) and portrait commissions: sittings spanning anywhere between a few weeks to two years.
Since the early 1990’s, she has collaborated on tindersticks album sleeves and related visual work. In 2006, the family (with their four children and 23 year old cat) re-located from London to the Limousin, France. Her studio - created from a hayloft, a conservatory greenhouse and a disused henhouse - evolved into a sort of ‘cabinet of curiosities’, with its growing cast of potential painting subjects, consisting of varied stuffed animals and birds, dolls and old toy animals, but remains also actively the space where portraits and still-lives are composed and painted.
In 2010, the project ‘A year in small paintings’ was born out of a need to quickly re-establish a regular, daily working routine. For 365 consecutive days, she painted the sky directly in oils on board, mostly from the studio window, but her paintbox had to necessarily travel everywhere with her during that year, including to Istanbul, Portugal, London, Nottingham and Cumbria. This study opened paths to new means of expression: large format oil paintings quickly followed, a series of carborundum prints (created in the Vienna studio of Master Printmaker, Tom Phelan) and the publication of ‘Singing Skies’ with Stuart A.Staples, as well as exhibitions (‘A year in small paintings’ is now a 5m. X 1m. piece of work) of the skies in several European cities, including Ghent, Berlin, London, Nottingham.
Suzanne’s work is fundamentally rooted in drawing and painting directly observed before the subject, but alongside that, there exists an exploration of more narrative, or theatrical, themes played-out by anthropomorphised personae on a stage of tragicomic ‘otherness’.
