Susan Stamp
Lecturer
Drawing
Please click here to view images of Susan's work.Qualifications
Graduate Diploma of Art and Design (Drawing) Prahran College of Advanced Education 1980; Bachelor of Art (Fine Art – Drawing) Victoria College (Prahran) 1988; Graduate Diploma in Film and Television (Animation) Victorian College of the Arts 1994.
Employment History
Began as a part time tutor at Victoria College in drawing 1985 – 86 and became lecturer in drawing from 1987 and now teaches 2 days a week at the Victorian College of the Arts. Her first solo exhibition was in 1986 and another in 1989 at Niagara Galleries, Melbourne and also at Swan Hill Regional Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1993. She also has exhibited in-group exhibitions of drawing from 1985. Her first animation short Nan is in a Box (1994) received wide showing in film festivals from 1994 – 2004 including the prestigious Annecy International Film Festival, France (1995). Her second The Windwheel (1998), which took 3 years to complete, was shown at Annecy in 1998 as well as several other International Film Festivals in 2003 and was purchased by SBS Television. Her third animation Cry from the Past (2006), a 6 minute film was a Dendy Awards Finalist at the Sydney International Film Festival 2007 and widely shown nationally and internationally 2006 - 07. She has received several early awards for drawing 1979 – 1990: and in recent years for best animation, Humboldt International Film Festival and the Silver Award, Independent Short Subjects, 32nd Annual World Fest, USA both for The Windwheel in 1999 and best Animation of the CINE 2006 International Documentary Film Festival, Montana USA for Cry from the Past in 2006. From 1995 she has received several Australian Film Commission travel grants to travel to festival and film venues. Represented ABC and SBS Television and in regional and university collections in Australia and overseas.
Publications
Seventh Drawing Biennale
Elizabeth Cross
Susan Stamp’s drawings alert us to the very provisional nature of both seeing and describing. The excitement and concentration of the artist’s hand moving in response to something fleeting observed is acutely present in these vivid, succinct and endearing drawings, which conjure what one writer has termed “the trajectory of moving life”.
Consider three drawings. In one an elephant subsides onto the ground and we can almost hear the exhaling of air as Stamp captures the precise moment when gravity takes over from volition. Weight, bulk and something like relief and resignation are encoded in the swift passage of charcoal. In another, a brown bear, in the act of rising, shifts his weight and turns, repositioning his head: this is rendered by a single almost uninterrupted line – a line whose pace is both terse and voluminous. And again: as a giraffe bends his impossible neck, camouflage spots spread across the paper and gather round the cone of his tail: the sheet is a landscape of expectation. In the multiple images of the gorilla there is wit, sensuality and gentle satire – seen together with their near relatives, the Zoo’s visitors, the question of who is the observer and whom the observed arises. We are in Ogden Nash territory here. Stamp’s visual lineage goes back to Rembrandt’s pen and ink drawing of an elephant, while also embracing the more recent studies of Gaudier-Bzreska and Mary Macqueen.
For Stamp the process of seeing and the act of drawing are indivisible – “telescoped together”. Is it necessary to remind ourselves, as Leonardo observed, that there is no such thing in nature as a line? To describe form by encompassing it with a line is an entirely cerebral behaviour, except that it seems to come naturally to us: children begin to draw their known and internalised world thus.
Already fascinated with the problems of the moving line’s relationship to the transience of perception and the instability of moving form. Stamp began the long process of making animated films from her substantial body of drawings. This allowed the introduction of narrative amid the poetry of unfolding, moving images. The short animated film Cry from the Past is one of three films which have resulted from her work in this medium, and a fourth is planned using some of the drawings of gorillas include here (some of which already show the process of the endless re-drawing and erasing that must take place in the unfolding sequence of animation).
Gorillas have become a fascination for the artist. Years of weekly drawing sessions in the Melbourne Zoo have born fruit, so that Stamp is now a familiar of both the gorillas and their keepers – and much of her drawing sessions take place within the confines of the gorilla enclosure. A unique relationship with these close relatives of humans has slowly grown, and conversation with Stamp about the gorilla images that multiply through dozens of sketchbooks tends to produce names and anecdotes, family histories and genealogies.
There is a kind of intimacy that develops between artist and model, both through the frequency of encounter and, for the artist, in the repeated drawing faces and bodies. The nature of engagement between the two parties involved in any form of portraiture has been widely documented.
That intimacy of gaze and its accompanying assurance in gesture is present in these drawings, which are firmly in the realm of portraiture: they breathe recognition and affection. As we look at and talk about the drawings, Stamp recognizes and names individuals within each. No matter how summary her line appears, the lineaments of each gorilla are there to recognise: Rigo (the big male Silver-Back), Johari, Yuska. Julia and G-Anne, the late Betsy – and Motaba and “the boys”.
There is a strong sense of play to these drawings. It is to be found not just in the subjects themselves, but also in the verve and lightness of touch that marks the artist’s spontaneous draughtsmanship – a delight in both the creatures who are her subject and in the act of drawing itself. But this is serious play. For all their speed of resolution, there is rarely a gratuitous line to be seen in these works. However, it is not only to this felicity of line that we respond as viewers, but to the vitality and pictorial strength of the drawings as drawings, to the quality of their particular graphic elements – the inflection of the pencil or charcoal as it delineates form and volume; the play of line against the white paper; and the way each depicted creature occupies the sheet which the drawing proclaims as his or her habitat.
The suite of 48 sketchbook sheets taken from the last three years of sketchbooks, is Stamp’s simian companion to the installation of 100 sketchbook sheets of Kevin Connor’s world of street and café. Susan Stamp captures the ephemeral moment just as surely – and fixes it in our memory with a spare tracery of moving lines. Enjoining a sense of the particular and the universal, these drawings achieve a delicate poise between urgent observation – a hallmark of their making – and the compelling “character” with which each creature is endowed.
Elizabeth Cross
Susan Stamp’s drawings alert us to the very provisional nature of both seeing and describing. The excitement and concentration of the artist’s hand moving in response to something fleeting observed is acutely present in these vivid, succinct and endearing drawings, which conjure what one writer has termed “the trajectory of moving life”.
Consider three drawings. In one an elephant subsides onto the ground and we can almost hear the exhaling of air as Stamp captures the precise moment when gravity takes over from volition. Weight, bulk and something like relief and resignation are encoded in the swift passage of charcoal. In another, a brown bear, in the act of rising, shifts his weight and turns, repositioning his head: this is rendered by a single almost uninterrupted line – a line whose pace is both terse and voluminous. And again: as a giraffe bends his impossible neck, camouflage spots spread across the paper and gather round the cone of his tail: the sheet is a landscape of expectation. In the multiple images of the gorilla there is wit, sensuality and gentle satire – seen together with their near relatives, the Zoo’s visitors, the question of who is the observer and whom the observed arises. We are in Ogden Nash territory here. Stamp’s visual lineage goes back to Rembrandt’s pen and ink drawing of an elephant, while also embracing the more recent studies of Gaudier-Bzreska and Mary Macqueen.
For Stamp the process of seeing and the act of drawing are indivisible – “telescoped together”. Is it necessary to remind ourselves, as Leonardo observed, that there is no such thing in nature as a line? To describe form by encompassing it with a line is an entirely cerebral behaviour, except that it seems to come naturally to us: children begin to draw their known and internalised world thus.
Already fascinated with the problems of the moving line’s relationship to the transience of perception and the instability of moving form. Stamp began the long process of making animated films from her substantial body of drawings. This allowed the introduction of narrative amid the poetry of unfolding, moving images. The short animated film Cry from the Past is one of three films which have resulted from her work in this medium, and a fourth is planned using some of the drawings of gorillas include here (some of which already show the process of the endless re-drawing and erasing that must take place in the unfolding sequence of animation).
Gorillas have become a fascination for the artist. Years of weekly drawing sessions in the Melbourne Zoo have born fruit, so that Stamp is now a familiar of both the gorillas and their keepers – and much of her drawing sessions take place within the confines of the gorilla enclosure. A unique relationship with these close relatives of humans has slowly grown, and conversation with Stamp about the gorilla images that multiply through dozens of sketchbooks tends to produce names and anecdotes, family histories and genealogies.
There is a kind of intimacy that develops between artist and model, both through the frequency of encounter and, for the artist, in the repeated drawing faces and bodies. The nature of engagement between the two parties involved in any form of portraiture has been widely documented.
That intimacy of gaze and its accompanying assurance in gesture is present in these drawings, which are firmly in the realm of portraiture: they breathe recognition and affection. As we look at and talk about the drawings, Stamp recognizes and names individuals within each. No matter how summary her line appears, the lineaments of each gorilla are there to recognise: Rigo (the big male Silver-Back), Johari, Yuska. Julia and G-Anne, the late Betsy – and Motaba and “the boys”.
There is a strong sense of play to these drawings. It is to be found not just in the subjects themselves, but also in the verve and lightness of touch that marks the artist’s spontaneous draughtsmanship – a delight in both the creatures who are her subject and in the act of drawing itself. But this is serious play. For all their speed of resolution, there is rarely a gratuitous line to be seen in these works. However, it is not only to this felicity of line that we respond as viewers, but to the vitality and pictorial strength of the drawings as drawings, to the quality of their particular graphic elements – the inflection of the pencil or charcoal as it delineates form and volume; the play of line against the white paper; and the way each depicted creature occupies the sheet which the drawing proclaims as his or her habitat.
The suite of 48 sketchbook sheets taken from the last three years of sketchbooks, is Stamp’s simian companion to the installation of 100 sketchbook sheets of Kevin Connor’s world of street and café. Susan Stamp captures the ephemeral moment just as surely – and fixes it in our memory with a spare tracery of moving lines. Enjoining a sense of the particular and the universal, these drawings achieve a delicate poise between urgent observation – a hallmark of their making – and the compelling “character” with which each creature is endowed.