Biography
Brought up in London, Sue Whitmore has spent her adult life in the city.
She studied Fine Art at the Central, Wimbledon and Sir John Cass Schools of Art and read Philosophy and History of Art at University College London.
Her father was the artist and teacher,
Robert Whitmore.
The artist
Apart from regular trips in Britain, her landscape work has taken her all over the world working, amongst other places in Eire, France, Jamaica, Italy and the USA. She mentors twice yearly landscape painting weeks (May & October) in the Marina Baja north of Alicante
(Old Olive Press) which has led to a group exhibition at the Pall Mall Deposit.
She tutors drop-in Life Classes at the
Tricycle Theatre on Thurday afternoons and evenings.
The poet
After five early 'slim' volumes, her first fat book of poems and drawings, "Sue, Realist" received critical acclaim for its 'interplay of poems and drawings from the imagination' (City Limits).
She won a Radio 4 competition, with an 'Alternative Christmas Poem' and is a member of 'Metrolands Poets' and 'The Brondesbury Group'.
The designer
She has completed many mural and theatre designs, including five years spent with W11 Children's Opera, two with AAC Opera for All, "Brilliant the Dinosaur"
for Richard Stilgoe, and many pieces for director
Chrys Salt.
The teacher
Every May and October Sue Whitmore mentors painting weeks in the Marina Baja mountains north of Alicante. For further information click
here.
Admin.
As a founder member, she chaired
Brent Artists' Register for fifteen years, a role that entailed all aspects of art administration, from running studios and exhibitions to liaising with the local authority and businesses. Artist
John Blandy is the current chair of B.A.R.
Reviews
'Flat Earth':
"Like many other women, Susan Whitmore is no stranger to the
conflicting demands of art and motherhood. Her exhibition at the Tricycle
Theatre Gallery is dominated by figures
undergoing sudden, perplexing shifts of identity. Heads are revealed as
empty masks which hide their wearers' true
feelings and sometimes strange creatures squat on the shoulders of people
who seem unable to control their own lives."
Although some of her most ingenious compositions bring together an
abundance of fragmented images, they are always
organised with great discipline. Even as she gives vent to the conflicts
within her, Whitmore knows how a defining
line can clarify the most bewildering state of mind."
Evening
Standard Richard Cork
'Personal Geology':
"Paintings and drawings, sculpture and poetry at the Tricycle Theatre
Gallery . . . The exhibition follows two themes: one a group of landscapes
depicting the country-side outside Palermo, Sicily. The other part of the
exhibition,
'Personal Geology', develops themes and images shown in her 1982
exhibition. While the landscapes may be more accessible, the more personal
drawings really correspond to feelings most people have to face, the
conflicts and paradoxes of the human condition. Sue Whitmore [has an]
instinctive and creative eye for a form of realism."
Kilburn Times John Clohessy
'Images of Ireland':
'Sue Realist'
poetry & drawings, the Baldwin Room, at the Tricycle Theatre'
. . . a remarkable feat of inventiveness and linear dexterity'
'The tranquil country scenes in this outstanding exhibition at the Tricycle
Gallery were created around the Beare Peninsula in Southern Ireland in the
autumn of 1991. The most extensive . . is the long charcoal and pastel
drawing called
'Inch Strand, Dingle'.
The images are well observed and skilfully drawn'
Pool, Dunloe Gap, Killarney', seems to shimmer. . . in the
autumn sunlight. 'Those ripples on the water were made by an otter swimming
across it. It was so quiet. The otter ignored me completely as I worked - a
beautiful moment.'
There are no figures or creatures in her work.
Thirty-eight drawings under the heading 'Sue Realist' are also on show. Each
has a built-in stygian creative anger about inherent complexities that
perception alone cannot solve or answer, and each is handled with a
sensitivity that has recognisable reference from the female perspective.
This show is a remarkable feat of inventiveness and linear dexterity. The
artist allows us to see what is going on inside her head, describing a whole
gamut of feelings that have an undercurrent of something we can't quite put our finger on.
It is a brave thing to do.
Harrow Observer Ken Govier
Poetry reviews and broadcasts
BBC Radio 4's Afternoon Shift
Winner of the Alternative Christmas Poem Competition with 'Post-Modern
Christmas'
- poem (broadcast on 5 consecutive days)
they also broadcast her Perverb: 'Better to have loved and lost than never
to have tasted chocolate'
Phil Jupitus Programme on GLR
'Habeas Porcus'
Poems on Buses
'Tribute to Lennon','Duchess's Revenge', 'The Suitor', were all 'Poems on the Buses'
Sue, Realist: a Selection of Poems & Drawings
Sue Whitemore (sic) offers a few wise old poems interspersed with
thought-provoking sketches and traverses the expansive realm of culture,
nature, psyche, spirit and society. This dynamic collection will excite
Greerian purists with lines like 'I find you guilty pig/of being big/of
being a beast'
(Habeas Porcus), and equally quench the thirst of
transcendent visionaries with 'Things of tomorrow are today's things
becoming dust at the bottom (Handbag Haiku). Whitmore deals with everything
from female complicity in male hubris to existential self-contempt. Though
recurrent motifs from a natural landscape present an essential creative
source, these are at times undercut by the presence of the deceptive
mirror-image in preserving the illusion of a unified sense of self. The
illustrations themselves attract as much attention as the poetry, surreal
sketches that might even have got old Sigmund to have a rethink. Though
Whitmore'
s accessible and concise language makes collection an enjoyable
read, the breadth of her theme does leave you wanting a more in-depth
'sue-realism'.
(CITY LIMITS Anthony Ilona - July 1992)
Member 'Metrolands' Poets, Buckinghamshire 1998 to date
'The Brondesbury Group'
of poets, 2002 to date
Recent exhibitions
"Behind the eyes of the sleepers . . . listen, you can hear their dreams" - Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood
Dreams distort the familiar, showing us other selves doing strange things in strange places and disturbing the indolence of the mind.
Freud and Jung used them to access things kept veiled, feared, desired in the mind's internal life, private phenomena, space for an unfettered subconscious,
something experienced alone.
Since her first exhibitions "Flat Earth" and "Personal Geology", and her book of poems and drawings of the 90's,
'Sue, Realist' Whitmore has frequently played with symbolic representations of feelings images that give "outward"
form to inner states rather than pursuing the Surrealist manifesto.
As in "Speaking Volumes" (2001) at the
Tricycle Gallery,
this exhibition continues themes which are, to some extent, a creative response to psychoanalysis with its images
of dreaming and poses of sleep and meditation. It connects her work from the figure with the world of the imagination
that underpins life as an artist.
In 2007 her etching "Beeches, afternoon, Isle of Whithorn" will be on
show in the Print Room at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
Solo exhibitions
2006 "Light & Dark"
2005 "Dreamers"
2005 "Escapement"
2001 "Speaking Volumes"
1998 "Living with Trees"
1996 "Artist in Jamaica"
1993 "Recent Work" - Cumbria
1991 "Images of Ireland"
1992 "Sue, Realist"
1992 "Irish landscapes"
1988 "August in the Auvergne"
1985 "Scapes and Spaces"
1984 "Personal Geology"
1982 "Flat Earth"