Sue is a master collagrapher and artistic storyteller. She shared her love of art and nature and explained her love of birds and sketchbooks during our Friday Feature Artist Interview.
Sue Brown's Friday Feature Artist Interview can be found at the bottom of this page.
Imagine walking through a quiet garden just as the birds begin to stir. There are feathers ruffling in the breeze and insects dancing through the leaves. Now picture capturing that moment in intricate detail, layer by layer, until it transforms into a piece of art that tells a story of nature itself.
This is the world Sue Brown invites us into every time she creates. She is a master printmaker and storyteller who has spent over twenty-five years perfecting the art of collagraph.
Supportive Beginnings
Sue was lucky to have support in her artistic endeavours as she was growing up. “I had a really supportive art teacher when I was at school,” she explains. “I wasn't massively academic. I'm dyslexic; I think a lot of artists are. We have a different creative mind, and my parents encouraged me. I went to art school, I did fine art, and I learned to do printmaking there, and I learned to do etching, and I've been carrying on ever since in different parts of my life. I've been a professional artist for about 30 years now, but before that, I did other things, art teaching, estate agent, managed a Body Shop, little things going along in my life, but art has always been my mainstay.”
Discovering Collagraph
It was discovering collagraph, though, that really changed Sue’s artistic experience. “It was amazing,” she remembers. “It was an interesting connection. I decided to go back into teaching. I'd been offered a job in further education to teach adults A Level art. I hadn't been in education for ten years, so I thought I'd go and have a look around different schools. And the first school I went to was the local Steiner School, and they had an amazing printmaking department. I saw this print on the wall. It was an onion. I can remember it to this day, and I said, ‘Gosh, that's a deep etching.’ She said, ‘No, that's a collagraph’. And she told me how to make it, and that's where it all started. I set up my own studio. There were bits of a press in the classroom that I was in, and I got that put together, and away I went. The exciting thing is there are no difficult chemicals. You don't have to worry about extraction. You do need an etching press, but I had availability for that, and I thought, ‘Well, I could do this myself.’”
The Bird Connection
Much of Sue’s work is focused on birdlife. “As an only child, dads like to bond, and being a daughter, it wasn’t going to be over sports. We had a massive garden when I lived outside Birmingham in the UK, and Dad loved to attract birds into the garden, and he loved gardening. He had lots of bird books, and he'd sit down and talk to me about the birds that came into the garden. We'd go on walks, and he'd name the flowers, and we’d look for fungus and that kind of stuff. It was his way to connect with me.”
Urban Birds and Flight
Sue nurtured a love of nature and birds with her father as a child. She explores the relationships we have with our feathered friends and is fascinated by all things ornithological.
What interests her is the way birds share the human world, “I'm very urban,” Sue says. “I'm not a country girl. I take my own photographs, and I put them in scenarios where it would be great to see them interacting with us. There's something about a washing line and pegs!
I love putting my birds into some kind of human scenario because they live with us in our gardens and our parks, not just in the countryside. I tend to photograph birds where they will hang around. Human places. So these photos were all taken in an outdoor coffee shop in a National Trust property because sparrows pick up crumbs. I took lots of photographs of sparrows, and thought, ‘How could I use these?’ And I just love that look of linen. I mean, those pieces of washing are all textured with wallpaper pressed into tile, cement, and then sealed and then inked up and printed. So they're printed separately to the birds, which are just made of cardboard and glue. That's the collagraph. The materials are really simple.”
A challenge for Sue is to capture the truth about birds in flight. “I love flying birds. And to capture flight is really difficult. It's difficult to photograph, and it's difficult to describe when you're doing a drawing or a print. It's really abstract because we don't see birds flying properly. So to capture that is really important to me.”
Sketchbooks
Sketchbooks are a big part of Sue’s life as an artist. “It's the thing that we don't exhibit, isn't it? It's the things that we don't show, but aren't they the most interesting things? It's where the ideas percolate. I have lots of sketchbooks, and I have a variety of sizes. I have experimental sketchbooks. I will draw everything first and then trace it and transform it into a collagraph. So it's all worked out before it happens on the piece. I'm very keen on hardback sketchbooks. I will put paper lithography prints into my sketchbook first and then draw them into it. Then there'll be the drawing of the bird, and then I'll add to it.”
Sue uses her sketchbooks for experimentation. She explains, “Things don't always go right, and I overwork it, but this is something I can look through and go through and ask, ’Is there an idea here? Is there something I can use?’ I mean, I've got a sketchbook here that I found at a show, and it had denim pages in it. This is all mixed media, working out what I can do. I discovered I can print paper lithography directly onto these denim pages, which was really exciting. This is how a collagraph will start. I will do a quite detailed drawing and then trace that drawing using my own photographic reference. I take nothing off the internet. As an artist putting work out there, I can't steal other people's photographs, so I'm often leaping into the garden with my camera, hoping it (the bird) won't fly off.”
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About Sue Brown
Sue describes herself as “artist using mixed media and printmaking to tell stories”.
She is a master printmaker and storyteller who has spent over twenty-five years perfecting the art of collagraph.
Sue explores all things ornithological and loves getting close to wild birds and being able to observe and describe their characters, feather patterns, and feet.
The inspiration of birds is the catalyst for her creativity.
Inspired by process as much as nature, Sue’s work springs from the pages of her sketchbooks, and she develops carefully researched themes, experimenting with collagraph printmaking, lino, and paper lithography using both paper and textile substrates.
