Susie Devenport (ARAS) has loved drawing and painting since the day she could pick up a crayon. In her youth, she was a regular exhibitor at Rotary Exhibitions around Sydney and at the Royal Easter Show. Selling her first paintings at the age of 15, she continued her studies on a part time basis at Julian Ashton’s Art School at the Rocks in Sydney, while completing her High School education. At Ashton’s she met and was taught by David Wilson and eventually followed him to his Annandale studio where she stayed until his departure to Bathurst.
By the time she was 20 she was a regular attendee at the Royal Art Society of NSW and has continued this association for over 30 years. She has been taught and influenced by numerous Sydney artists including David Wilson, Brian Blanchard, Henry Hanke, Fred Bates, Ann Cape, Tony Duarte and Joe Penn. She continues to paint with many outstanding Sydney painters in small groups and derives much pleasure from this shared love of art and their friendships.
Her art-making has always been an extremely personal pursuit and passion. Susie has a strong drawing foundation, working in all mediums, including charcoal, conte, ink and pencil. She feels gestural drawings can be the most intensely emotive form of expression and loves the exploration of line, space and colour through oils, pastels and mixed media. She enjoys the freshness and spontaneity of painting directly from life, “alla prima” and has always had a fascination for faces and the human form, often using humour and compassion to highlight the human ethos.
She has never been particularly commercially orientated although has exhibited in numerous galleries, mostly around the Sydney area, and is a regular exhibitor at the Royal Art Society’s Lavender Bay Gallery, North Sydney. Although primarily a figurative painter, Susie also enjoys getting outdoors and painting landscapes; at one stage with Allan Waite and the Plein Air Painters group. Her first solo exhibition, “Lifelines”, was a near sell-out, raising funds for the Cure Cancer Australia Association and she later participated in a group exhibition at Dale Thomas Gallery, Artarmon, in aid of the Motor Neurone Disease Association of NSW. In 2008 she was a finalist in the Berkelouw Portraiture Awards. As well as being an exhibiting member of Portrait Artists Australia, she is an Associate of the Royal Art Society of NSW.
Addicted to travel, she has been known to arrive at the airport laden down with oil paints, French easel, boxes of pastels or at the very least a pocket sketchbook which is always close at hand.
Susie has worked on commissions, received various commendations and awards over the years and is represented in collections both overseas and locally.