Susan Brown

I have been inspired for much of my working life, both in painting and designing, by two symbols: the circle and the line. I believe that these two symbols hold what I can only describe as a sort of DNA of visual references, a set of parts, representing for me the continuum and the measure of life.

The circle round and contained has no beginning and no end, found in the cycle of life, in the sun, the moon, the earth. The line, becomes the measure, for example between sweet and sour, good and bad, young and old, hot and cold. Together these two symbols, provide the means to understand and perhaps create, to be used as building blocks in the disciplines of painting and design, and for me they are and always will be inseparable.

I’m on the Ile de la Cité in Paris, one of my favourite cities. I’m looking at Notre Dame, iconic, awe-inspiring, and I marvel at its size, its majesty, its history, its beauty and intricate detail, its structure and its power. I witness the crowds paying homage to this masterpiece and wonder at the peoples who, throughout history have passed by its doors – I’m searching, essentially, for a connection between this iconic masterpiece and the natural world, and I find it in the line and the circle, the measured and the continuum, symbols of life, of power, perhaps of a spiritual world – God – the Sun – the giver of life – the window – the light on the world.

Man’s relationship to his environment, has always held a fascination. The natural world has a complicated form and structure, a set of precedents that create and guide its existence – patterns, rhythms, formulas, the cycle of growth and decay, the juxtaposition of nature’s fragility and its power. These principles found in nature that often inform the built environment, and so a building, a tree, a city, a person, the connection with its history, its passing, its life, have become my subjects and the visual language and vocabulary that I use. This journey of looking, being, seeing objects in my time and in my space, a witness to a moment of continuum, has become my work.