Susan Dorothea White was born in Adelaide in 1941 but spent her childhood in Broken Hill where her family, especially her grandfather who was an amateur watercolorist, encouraged her to make art. When at boarding school in Adelaide she was able to take Saturday morning art classes with the Surrealist painter, James Cant. After leaving school in 1958 she enrolled in the South Australian School of Art where her teachers included Cant, Dora Chapman and Jacqueline Hick. In 1960 she had her first experience with printmaking when she was taught lithography by Udo Sellbach.
Her interest in classical drawing meant that in mid 1960 she moved to Sydney to enrol in the Julian Ashton Art School where she was taught drawing by Henry Gibbons. She also undertook extra classes in sculpture with Lyndon Dadswell at the National Art School.
She had been exhibiting with local and art school groups while a student, but in 1962 held her first solo exhibition at the Broken Hill Technical College. Following the exhibition she settled in Sydney where she rented a room and worked as a shop assistant for Grace Bros department store while she entered local art prizes. A painting was exhibited in the 1962 Waratah Art Prize.
Later that year she married Dudley Stuart Anderson and the couple moved to lodgings in Paddington. To make ends meet she became a shift worker selling newspapers at Wynyard station, then at a city bargain store.
The birth of her three children in 1964, 1965 and 1968 provided her with more intimate subject matter. In 1967 the family moved to a house in Glebe where she supplemented the family income by working as a dressmaker, sewing curtains for theatrical productions and making paper flowers, which she sold on the street from the baby’s pram.
Despite family circumstances and the less than supportive environment for women artists in this decade, she continued to make art. Inspired by traditional Chinese landscapes and the late works of JMW Turner she turned to painting half imagined places. Technically this approach was assisted by moving from oil painting to acrylic.
The marriage ended in 1971, and she once again was free to exhibit. In order to support her children, she worked as a waitress in the evening, painting when she could in her bedroom which doubled as a studio. She held her second solo exhibition at the Sydenham Galleries in Adelaide, during the 1972 Festival.
In 1973 with her new partner Dr Brian Freeman, a medical academic, the family moved to Annandale. For the first time she had dedicated studio space. The previous year she had returned to printmaking after taking classes at the Willoughby Arts Centre, so was able to establish a lithography workshop in the studio, making her own press out of a mangle from a discarded washing machine, before eventually purchasing a printing press in 1977.
She continued to enter prizes and in 1975 was awarded the Macquarie University John Gero Prize.
Many of her landscapes from the early 1970s onwards were the result of family camping trips. Her approach to the structure of her works in the late 1970s was influenced by fugal patterns in music, triggered in part by her resumption of earlier studies in music.
In 1979 the family spent some time in West Germany where she was able to closely study the work of the early Renaissance masters as well as Kathe Kollwitz. She subsequently exhibited in Munich and in the Intergrafik ’84 Trienniale in Berlin and the International Triennial Against War – Majdanek 85 in Lublin. Her lithograph Chess was subsequently acquired by the Lublin museum.
This very productive period of the 1980s also saw her return to sculpture, carving in wood and stone.
In 1988 after her Blake Prize entry, The First Supper, attracted some controversy, she travelled to Europe where it became the key work in solo exhibitions in Amsterdam and Cologne. The success of these exhibitions led to her work being acquired by a number of European collections. She was later included in many exhibitions in the Kyoto City Museum.In 1994 her work was favourably noticed when she exhibited in a Foreign Showcase Exhibition at the Montserrat Gallery in New York. A continuing exhibiting profile in New York led to her sculpture being acquired by the Hechinger Collection and later was commissioned to make work for the Buhl collection.
In 2000 she began to make precise anatomical drawings in the tradition of Leonardo da Vinci. This led to her work in establishing workshops on anatomy drawing at the University of New South Wales, which she helped run until 2007.
It was therefore not surprising when she was commissioned to write and illustrate Draw Like da Vinci , which included over 100 of her drawings.
- Writers:
- Susan Dorothea White
- Date written:
- 2009
- Last updated:
- 2018
