Titanic star Kate Winslet is a fan of Kate Van Suddese’s sea paintings. Ruth Campbell meets the petite painter who is making a big impact on the art world

KATE Van Suddese’s huge oil canvases are a mass of swirling sea and crashing waves, the vivid brush strokes and intense colours packed with raw emotion.

Loved by collectors both in the UK and abroad, her paintings of the sea along our North-East and North Yorkshire coastline hang on walls in New Mexico, New Zealand and even Beverly Hills.

Film director Sam Mendes bought two large oils for his then wife Kate Winslet as a Christmas present, one featuring a soft-coloured Scarborough coastline and the other, a stormy green sea, a fitting gift for the star of the Titanic.

It is hard to believe that petite, softly spoken Van Suddese, who stands just five feet tall, is the artist behind these huge, visually loud creations, many of which are as big as 6ft by 6ft.

The 49-year-old works from home in a tiny, womb-like studio, just 11ft by 9ft, in her semidetached 1950s house in Durham city, where she lives with her husband, Peter, a retired set designer. She prefers to paint at night, when it is pitch black outside, by the light of just one electric light bulb, which allows her to achieve the sort of vivid, intense colours which characterise her work.

“I love working in my little studio, I like it being small. It’s all about comfort, it’s perfect.

There are no distractions or unnecessary elements.

I feel closer to my canvases and like the fact I have to stand on a stool sometimes to paint the top of a really large piece. It stops me over-working it.”

While her smaller paintings sell for £400, her larger canvases cost in the range of £2,500 and many of her shows, such as her first at The Cube at Newcastle’s Biscuit Factory in 2009, have been sell-outs. “All 40 paintings sold at The Cube,” she recalls. “But I haven’t made my fortune. I just like to make enough money to keep painting. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

Her early career, when she was raising her young son, Ben, now 22, on her own as a single parent was, she admits, a struggle. She survived on a mixture of part-time jobs and income support, while also studying at art college.

“I had no-one to care for my son as my parents weren’t able. I had to rely on myself,” she says. “But, all the time, I was painting. It was a struggle, but a happy struggle. That’s what makes it worthwhile.”

It was while her mother, Hazel, who suffered from breast cancer, was ill that Van Suddese was drawn to the sea. During the time she was caring for her and after she died, 19 years ago, the sea gave her solace. “It was quite a traumatic time and I spent a lot of time walking around the coast, at Tynemouth, Sunderland, Roker and Marsden. That was the way I dealt with it. It was a panacea, being at the seafront when the wind was blowing and the sea crashing, it’s the only place I felt any empathy.”

It took her about a year to paint her first series of sea paintings, Sea Senses. “I started to visit all the places I had been with my family, like Whitby and Robin Hood’s Bay. I could feel emotions without being distraught. The sea became my emotional outlet.”

Eventually, she met her husband and her sea paintings came to reflect her happiness. “As our relationship blossomed and we got married, the paintings became an expression of love as well as death and life,” she says.

Today, Van Suddese tends to rent cottages in coastal villages like Robin Hood’s Bay and gets up in the early hours to study the sea with her notebook, often sitting by the harbour until the sun comes up. “This is one of my favourite places from childhood. It’s so beautiful and the bay is so safe and secure. It’s amazing watching the sun come up there.”

She and Peter often walk and cycle around the coastal routes. “I spend a fair amount of time travelling about at odd hours of the day to catch different light and colour. I like any sea. But it’s not just about what I see, it’s about sounds and what I’m thinking and feeling too.

Sometimes it is sunny and calm and I will go back and paint it stormy.”

Inspired by Turner and the Impressionists, there is much play of light and drama in her work. “Sometimes I paint a scene for the sheer beauty of the place itself, or the light. Stories and the history of a place may spark off a series of work too.”

She occasionally paints in Scotland and Cornwall. “I do paint around a lot of Britain but my heart does belong to the North-East and North Yorkshire,” she says. “I like to concentrate on the memories I have of places from my own childhood and hope to invoke others’ childhood memories too.” She has also painted Durham street scenes. “I love my city and, now and then, have to paint it.”

Van Suddese, who was a pupil at Framwellgate Moor comprehensive school, comes from a close-knit Durham family. Her mother was a nurse and father a heating services inspector and Kate grew up with art and painting at the centre of family life.

Her father, now in his 80s, has just taken up painting again recently. “I used to sit and watch dad painting little landscapes and started sketching and painting myself from the age of about seven,” she says.

Van Suddese has recently discovered her grandfather’s cousin was the celebrated and influential linocut artist, Katherine Jowett, who emigrated to China in the early 1900s. “So there is a history of painters in the family.”

Van Suddese’s teacher at Framwellgate Moor, was an inspiration too, encouraging her to apply to Sunderland Art College, though she initially dropped out of her first degree course at Manchester College of Art. “I wanted to paint how I wanted to paint. You get a bit arrogant when you are young,” she says. She went on to work as a secretary and in other part-time jobs while she continued painting, mainly portraits and commissions.

The renowned Lancastrian painter Theodore Majors befriended her. “With his no-nonsense approach to life he encouraged me to paint what I wanted to paint,” she says. “My life is my painting, it is an obsession, all I have ever wanted to do.”

It wasn’t until 1990 that she started to show work on a larger scale after moving back to Durham with Ben. Whilst juggling her exhibitions and painting with part-time work and raising her son, she decided to go back and study for her degree at Sunderland University in 1998, when Ben was eight years old.

AFTER graduating, her work took off. “It just snowballed and I haven’t stopped since. I’m so lucky to be able to live my dream,” she says. As well as showing her work in galleries in Durham and Newcastle, she has had successful exhibitions at the Mall Galleries in London, the Leith Gallery in Edinburgh and the Red Rag Gallery in Worcestershire.

She produces a series of sea paintings each year, in collections of from six up to 35 works. And they are always square. “I like the square, it fits with the way my mind goes, it suggests infinite space.

A rectangle seems to have a top and bottom and two sides.

“I love to see the paint breathe on the canvas, to make a mark and watch the rest of the work unfold.”

Although she has strong attachments to Durham, one day Van Suddese hopes to live on the coast. But it has to be in the North-East. “I love the region and the people. I love to show my work here and really appreciate it when people connect with it.”

She recalls an exhibition of her work in Durham a few years ago, when she observed a little old lady staring at one of her huge, abstract canvases. “I was so convinced she wouldn’t like it. She turned to talk to her friend and said ‘I can see all sorts of things in that canvas’. That really touched me.”

katevansuddese.com

Kate Van Suddese’s work can be seen at:

• Tallantyres Gallery, 43-45 Newgate Street, Morpeth NE61 1AT. Tel: 01670-517214.

• Sanders Yard, 95 Church Street, Whitby YO22 4BH. Tel: 01947-825010.

• ArtsBank 29 Milton Street, Saltburn-By-The- Sea, TS12 1DJ. Tel: 01287-625300.

• The Art Shop and Kemble Gallery, 62 Saddler Street, Durham, DH1. Tel: 0191-3864034