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Camille Souter HRHA (b.1929)
The Alexander in a Broken Pot
Oil on paper, 55.5 x 39cm (22 x 15½”)
Signed and dated 1973. Signed again, inscribed with title and dated verso
Bruce Arnold has written of Camille Souter:- “Richness. Not prodigality. Nothing wasted.
Intimations of so much still to come. Behind the titles, poetry and vision, an exciting mind
at work. In her colours great simplicity, yet great depth. Her subjects are so often human
wastelands, junk, dereliction, the fringes of great cities. Yet she brings to them a passionate
concern, not for their welfare - that is not in her painting, she is not a romantic - but for
their simple existence, their life in the light of day.This means that her passionate concern is
directed with equal intensity at all things. Cabbages in a back yard in Winter, iron bed ends,
bicycle wheels, open stretches of land and sky, distant towns and cities, are reduced in, and
by, her eyes to the fragmentation of understanding, and are then transformed into paintings
that obey strictly egalitarian principles. All things are equal in Camille Souter’s world, and
the only inequality she has to contend with is the degree of her success in transforming vision
into the reality of a finished canvas. She has to contend with the difficulty of choosing what
to paint when all things lay equal claim on her attention. The easy landscape, the obvious
still life, these are not for her. And in this she is by no means unique. But whereas for many
artists, who choose to paint as she does, the result of picking on debris and decay - the butt
ends of life - is so often sombre and drab, with her the result is painting which sings with
light and colour.There is a gleam, a richness to her tones: her contrasts of colour are vivid, yet
controlled; and her composition - the placing of low nondescript buildings along a horizon,
the casual assembling of objects on a table - has just the right measure of flatness, of the
minor key, to keep within the bounds the splendid assurance of her paint, both in colour and
texture. She is a completely integrated artist, and this gives her great flexibility. As well as all
things being equal to Camille Souter all people are, too. And the titles of her paintings are
often like invitations; here are quite ordinary things for quite ordinary people to see. But how
well they have been gathered, and how well transformed.”
Garrett Cormican in his book on “Camille Souter :The Mirror in the Sea” states “For Souter,
all still lifes are essentially ‘ ... a glorification of life - what a wonderful world . What more
can you say about them ?”. Camille’s still life paintings are those in which she arranged the
objects herself - they “ made her feel like a ‘real painter’ “ as she had no formal training she
felt that this was what art students spent their time doing in art college .
€8,000 - 12,000
