Sue Lovegrove’s works reflect her close relationship to the natural environment. Her paintings explore the interplay between surface and depth, layers building opacity in rich blue and deep ochre plunge the eye downwards before it is caught in an instant and returned to the rippling surface by fine slivers of sunlight. Fleeting renderings dance across the ageless deep of oceans and lakes. Through diving and rising again and again comes the realisation that these landscapes are as physical as psychological, as real as invoked.
Lovegrove’s highly detailed and exquisitely fine brushwork captures the shifting of the wind as it weaves patterns across the surfaces of wetlands, rivers and oceans. The works map the world’s most fragile wilderness, beginning in Tasmania and travelling southward. The journey into the unknown is palpable as if the weather itself travels through the artist’s hand; a solitary calm cast over by the temporary turbulence of interacting forces.
Born in Adelaide in 1962, Lovegrove completed a Bachelor and PhD at the ANU in Canberra. Sue has held over 30 solo exhibitions throughout Australia and her work is held in numerous private and public collections including: the National Gallery of Australia, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, University of Canberra and the Macquarie Bank to name just a few.
In 2020, Sue was awarded the Elaine Bermingham National Watercolour Prize for Landscape painting with her work ‘The Voice of Water, (No 9.24). In 2018 she also received an Australia Council Grant to publish The Voice of Water, with Tasmanian poet Adrienne Eberhard. Sue has undertaken numerous residencies including an Australian Antarctic Division Arts Fellowship in 2003 to visit Antarctica and Macquarie Island and in 2006 an Arts Tasmania Wilderness residency to spend 2 months on Maatsuyker Island. In 2015 she studied Persian miniature painting in London.
Sue currently lives and works in Tasmania.
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