What Inspires My Art

My work is primarily inspired by the natural beauty of my birth and adopted homes, and I'm often to be found when out and about, stopped at some viewpoint or other taking photos of a special view, or play of light. I am drawn to liminal times and places, sunrise, sunset, ancient stones, water, storms, mist and memory, the places in between.

North Downs Morning

Colour and texture have always fascinated me, but I got thrown out of Art class for making a mess of the expensive oil pastels, myself, and the table. My art teacher convinced me that I could not, and never would be able to draw, so I sewed, embroidered, felted, spun, dyed, knitted and wove with silk, wool, and other natural fibres, because Art will not be denied.

During the Pandemic, I found watercolour, and soon recognised that this was MY medium. I was able to to play with colour in a faster, more fluid way, and capture images in paint that expressed my love for the landscapes I could not visit, while lending some of the precision required for Fibre Arts to this new medium. I permitted myself to play and to fail. ⁣I used photographs of beloved landscapes on both sides of the ocean as reference and allowed my mind to travel where I could not.

And I did not fail, Mrs R!

I travelled extensively as a child, being born in New Zealand, christened in Australia, and educated there, Canada, New Zealand and England. I returned to England to live at 20, but I return to my native New Zealand often enough to feel permanently homesick for one place or the other.

I regularly sell prints of my Artwork from my Facebook Page, Su Jolly, Artist, have a couple of collectors, was commissioned to paint the cover of Erosion, a Gothic novel by Lucya Starza, which drew inspiration for one of the protagonists from my paintings of the Kent landscape. In 2025, I completed a life changing month as the Artist in Residence at Mud and Wool, Creative Escapes in Wales, which furnished much of the work for my upcoming Exhibition, to be titled Hiraeth.

It is this feeling that inspires so much of my art, Hiraeth, from the Welsh, a profound and wistful longing for home; a home to which one can never return, a home, perhaps, that never was. I can tell you that Kiwis adrift from their native land experience it too.

So I describe my works as “Holidays for the Mind” a chance to be drawn into one of my beloved landscapes, take a deep breath, and find a moment of peace and mindfulness, between one breath and the next.