Susan Laughton

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Structured

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Susan's long standing interest in landscape and architecture has always inspired her drawing and painting. Vernacular buildings, both rural and urban, domestic and functional, have found a place in her paintings for some time, no doubt also informed by time as an architectural technician.

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Susan's paintings are a combination of observed and imagined topographical structures.

Inspiration also comes from the distant edges of landscape: horizons of sky, land and sea interacting.  They are created from many visual sources that are filtered through sketchbook work and altered intuitively as the painting progresses.

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Susan's paintings and drawings evolve from half- remembered glimpses seen from the corner of her eye, fleeting juxtapositions elusive to photography, the dislocated reverie of long car journeys or from more studied compositions.

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The landscape is the starting point, not as a picturesque or static view but as a space travelled through and experienced often on the edges of the urban and the rural.  It is a source of man made and natural structures, surfaces and colour from which Susan's reductive personal responses develop.

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Process and materials are important as a way of allowing the paintings to emerge as objects in their own right.  Structured and methodical approaches combined with spontaneous and intuitive reactions allow her to plan and take risks: to combine control with "let's see what happens if..."