Camille Souter

Camille Souter is one of Ireland's most respected and well-loved painters. No. 28 in Gandon Editions' PROFILES series on Irish artist documents the artist's career since she started out. "As a general rule, Camille Souter’s style is elliptical; she avoids virtually anything obvious and seems to be naturally incapable of overstatement. To suggest and evoke is her forte, to set the imagination working rather than to surfeit it ... Her use of colour, like everything else she does, is peculiarly her own, and any analysis of it seems largely redundant from the start. You can only acknowledge that it ‘works’, that it is hers and nobody else’s, part of what Chagall used to call the artist’s ‘chemistry’. Her vision is a very human and even affectionate one, not in the least negative or dark. Many of her themes are everyday and ordinary in their lyricism, with a sense of the diurnal round and of inevitable wear and tear and ageing, and they often imply normal, even humble, activity in the background, or even in the foreground. It does not, however, as Impressionism so often did, attempt to catch and pin down the fugitive, passing moment and fix it – time in dissolution, this might almost be called. Nevertheless, she is quite close to the Impressionists in certain ways, including the use of a deliberately casual, self-contained look, certain oblique, asymmetrical methods of construction and placing, the avoidance of rhetorical or high-flown subjects, the inclination to let her pictures speak for themselves without undue emphasis or laboriously spelling things out. A hint is usually enough." (Brian Fallon)

Hardback

Published by Gandon Editions