Susan Dorothea White Bibliography

TRANSLATION: Lithographs – Watercolours – Paintings of Susan D. White

Susan White has a highly individual style of realism in which, just as in a fugue, the subject is treated several times from different aspects within the same composition. The subject matter is drawn from the family, the artist’s experiences in her homeland Australia and in Bavaria, and from allegorical and historical sources. The human condition is an important element in the artist’s work, as is evident in the lithographs The Retired Mechanic, The Empty Chair, Two, and The Children’s Hospital. In many works, including the lithographs The Gardener’s Dream, The Wishful Fisherman, and The Magic Pudding, the imagination of a person or the fantasy of a child is interpreted with a wistful sense of humour. Light-hearted irony can be discovered in Noah’s Rocket and The Nun and the Knight on the Train to Rothenburg.

Susan White is constantly sketching from everyday life and it is from the many sketchbooks that she first extracts the material for her compositions. The artist is skilled in several different media, including painting and printmaking, and a major composition may be rendered as a watercolour painting, an acrylic painting, and a lithograph.

Through experimentation in the medium of acrylic painting on wood, the artist has developed her own technique that produces nuance in colour and subtle gradations in tones. The basis of the method is the application of successive washes of acrylic colour to the wood with light sanding of the surface between each wash. Many of these compositions are done on Pacific maple and Australian cedar.

In printmaking and watercolour painting, the artist works on different types of paper, ranging from Japanese handmade papers to European cotton papers.

All the graphic works are printed by the artist in limited editions on a hand-press.

—Dr. Anton Wernig