How France Made Me An Artist at Forty

The year we turned 40, my husband and I left our two young girls with my parents for a couple of weeks while we ventured to Europe.  Our destinations were Paris, the French Riviera, Florence and Venice.  

At the time, I was just in the process of winding up my fashion business, was coaching other creative professionals and playing around with art again. I’d always circled back around to painting throughout my life at certain pivotal points, having always had the desire to pursue that path professionally. But I always seemed to wind up choosing something far more practical.  

It was on this trip, and specifically during my time in Paris and the South of France, that I realised that it was now or never.  After visiting some of the finest museums in the world and satisfying my urge for a deep dive into the art that spoke to me most, a creative fire and love of painting was lit inside of me that was undeniable. The time had finally come for me to pursue this long-held dream of becoming a painter in a more serious way.

It was on this trip that I first went to the Musee D’Orsay in Paris to see the most comprehensive collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in the world. I was, to say the least, completely bowled over.  Sure, I had seen my fair share of works by all the artists here in travelling exhibitions to Australia over the years.  And I’d seen many of them in reproductions during my six years as an art-history student. But nothing prepared me for the impact that having so many masterpieces before me eyes would have on me.  

The day after, we travelled to Monet’s home and garden in Giverny, where I was able to see the delightful home in which he lived, the studios in which he painted and the gardens and ponds that he created for the express purpose of painting them.  It was early May, spring in France, and utterly breathtaking.  I sat in the gardens with other artists and sketched in my sketchbook and soaked up all that beauty and romance and felt my dream grow even more.  We returned home that day, via a trip to the incredible Versailles and its incomparable grandeur and a lovely lunch at a charming village restaurant.

The next day, back in Paris, we ventured to the Musee L’Orangerie to see the famous ‘Nymphaea’ (Waterlily) paintings that Monet painted through the dark years of world war I. He intended this enormous series of large canvases as a gift to France, a sort of painted legacy.  

I was fascinated to learn that the Nymphaea were painted in the space that now contains the gift shop at Monet’s studio in Giverny that I had stood in the day before. The old Orange tree hot houses at the Jardin Tuileries (after which the museum was named) were custom renovated to hold these paintings in two rooms in a continuous elliptical configuration. Monet intended that they would be viewed in that way as a full immersion experience with his almost entirely abstracted dreamscape of his waterlily ponds.  

The effect of these paintings is astonishing and can only be fully appreciated when seen in real life.  The same can be said of all the works of Monet, Sisley, Morisot, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Manet, Cassatt, Pissarro, Laurencin among many others too numerous to mention at the Musee D’Orsay and the Walter-Guillaume collection at the rear of the L’Orangerie.  

I had studied art history for 6 years and was very familiar with all their work through reproductions.   But when I stood before them and tracked their linear development through each of these museums, I was deeply affected, and quite simply, I felt driven to paint!

Nothing can replace the experience of seeing the individual shape of a brush stroke in a certain artist’s work.  Nothing rivals seeing the luminous glow of Impressionist canvases that simply cannot be captured in photographs.  To see the impossibly thick impasto brush strokes of Van Gogh and his reverberating colours.  To witness the effect of the complicated and minute colour theory of the Pointillists at play.  And to finally see the works in person of masterful female artists such as Cassatt, Morisot and Laurencin when they are so often not represented in traditional art history.  I did not really understand any of it, or even begin to see where my own work might be influenced by what I was seeing, had I not seen them in person. 

This is the power of travel for the artist.  It lights a fire within.  It makes sense in the way it can only make sense to a person who paints.  It enriches you and your work.  It is pure magic that feeds the creative well.

I continued this experience this when we travelled down to the South of France to the Riviera, where so many incredible artists worked in the latter part of their lives.  There are museums dedicated to Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, Renoir and Chagall, just to name a few.  I had never been particularly drawn to Chagall’s work until I saw it in his museum in Nice.  I cried. The colour was transcendent in real life.

Since that visit to France at 40 I have established myself as a professional artist and am astonished to find myself at the eve of my 45th birthday selling work all over the world. In 2018 I ran my first sold out art retreat in the South of France, where we stayed in the village where Renoir lived and painting in our worn medieval Villa.  It was a dream.

But the bigger dream for me, has been to run art retreat and paint in Paris. To share some of this magical and transformative experience with my fellow artists.  To revisit these incredible museums that so inspired me on that first visit.  To journey back to these inspiring locations and share my knowledge and observations of all that I have learned from these artists. 

And last, but not least, to paint in Paris in our very own dedicated art studio.  I’m so incredibly grateful to my collaborators at Arts and Cultural Travel who have helped me to re-create this journey for you in our 2020 Art Retreat in Paris.  We will trace these very same steps and also paint in our very own Parisian art studio. 

My hope is that our guests will experience the same profound and long-lasting effects that this very journey that I have re-created in my 2020 Paris art retreat had on me. It is indeed a labour of love and something that I long to share with my fellow artists

I’ll be teaching my floral abstract style- a very accessible style of mixed media acrylic painting- that is totally suitable for both beginner and experienced painters alike.  

If you’d like to learn more about painting with me in Paris, you can read more about it here.

Au Revior, and I so hope to be meeting you in Paris on Spring day very soon!

Suse xo

Some of the books currently in my reading pile.