Colour, Curiosity, and Instinct — Susannah Bleasby on intuition, colour, and staying with the work

cgoucher
20 hours ago
5 min read

Susannah didn’t set out to become an artist. It took time, and a few hard turns, to come back to it.

She’s always been drawn to creative work. Design, storytelling, theatre, colour. But painting didn’t feel like a real path until much later, when she returned to it looking for something more.

Now it’s not optional. It’s part of who she is.

Her work is built through instinct. Colour, movement, and a constant balancing of energy and restraint. We talked about intuition, frustration, and what it means to keep going when things don’t quite land.

When did painting start to feel like something more than just something you enjoyed?
I’ve always been an imaginative person drawn to the arts – design, creativity, storytelling, theatre, comedy … all the thing that make life fun and colourful. But it took years and years before I saw my own art as a worthwhile viable career pursuit. And to be honest, even then it was only after a number of personal failures that I came back to it in a desperate search for joy and a sense of purpose.

Since then, I’ve simply been working really hard and following this thing I love to do with all my heart, trusting and believing the path will continue to unfold before me. Painting has long since stopped feeling optional – it’s who I am now and forever.
Your colour palette feels so distinctive. How did you arrive at that visual language over time?
Although I like to experiment with the whole rainbow and beyond, I’ve definitely got some go-to signature colours (I will never tire of orange, bright pink and swamp green!) But as colourful as my work is, I’m very sensitive to “too much” when it comes to the overall painting palette of a piece though, so I watch the combinations and saturation levels carefully and always make sure there are areas for the eye to rest. That goes for the brush work too – there can be active areas with energetic strokes, but they need to be balanced out with quieter marks.

The overall ‘look’ of my work is something that has emerged over time and continues to evolve as I do – growing, shifting, changing to some degree with constant learning and exploring along the way. But general, I do find brighter colours give me an energy boost and visual spark that lights up my heart, and smoother, more solid colours soothe my anxious mind. There’s a visual balance of a contented feeling (lively but not busy, calm but not boring, colourful but not garish) that I’m trying to find no matter what I’m painting.
When have you had to trust your instincts most as an artist?
Trusting my instincts and listening to intuition is something I’m constantly working on – both in life and in art. It’s something that comes more readily to me as I’ve gotten older simply having years of learned experience behind me. The kind of guidance that comes from connecting with my inner voice has been invaluable in my life and for that, I need to get really, really quiet and just listen. The answers, the direction, that sense of knowing … it’s always there to help me move forward.

Creatively, every painting of mine is the result of a thousand instinctual decisions – all those colour choices along the way, what goes where and why … my work, particularly the abstracts, is very intuitive at its core. I also lean on my instincts when it comes to bigger picture things like knowing what I can and can’t do, what projects/commissions I should or shouldn’t take on and where my true interests are leading me, regardless of what others want or expect from me. It can be a hard thing to follow through on, and stay true to sometimes, but that little inner voice of mine is what seems to know what’s best for me, and so I listen.
When you feel creatively stuck or stretched thin, what helps you come back to making?
To be honest, just making stuff – drawing, painting, writing – has never been a problem. I can do it day in, day out … something is almost always happening. But making good art and feeling really connected and inspired by what I’m making definitely has ebbs and flows and days or weeks on end of feeling frustrated with what I’m making/not liking what I’m seeing. I’m sort of in that place right now actually and it’s a hard place to be! ( I sort of know the knot I’m in – what my brain wants, what my gut wants, and what my paints are doing are all in different places and I haven’t quite figured out, or had the courage maybe, to unravel it in a way that feels right. )

I’m someone who truly believes the work begets the work and that consistent momentum within my practice is key. Nothing will happen if nothing is happening – so I just keep trying. I try to approach each day, each painting, with that beginners mindset of ‘I don’t know – I’ll just play and see what happens’. It keeps it all fun if nothing else! And its why I spend hours with my abstracts – they’re a place to explore endlessly with no rules, rhyme or reason. I’ll try new things in new ways, mix weird colours, different materials, turn things upside down and sideways … anything to switch things up and keep my curiosity on its toes.
What are you feeling pulled toward exploring in your work right now?
I’ve been working on a new abstract floral collection for a while now, and it’s slowly but surely coming together in a really beautiful way. After a long winter and with all the ugliness in world news, it feels so good to be surrounded by flowers and feel the beautiful, healing and uplifting energy of nature in my brushstrokes.

The bigger ‘pull’ for me these days is caught up in a much deeper and more intimate conversation that I have with myself about being brave in my work, more daring with what I create and pushing further and further out of my comfort zone to discover what lies beyond. I want to get messier, wilder, bolder, weirder come what may!
What’s a small part of your process that never stops feeling special?
The pure and honest fun of it all. Just putting colour down and smushing it around in weird and wonderful ways lights up my imagination and keeps my heart beating in ways that I can’t describe. Painting has somehow given my life purpose and meaning and reason to carry on. In some ways it’s all so small and insignificant – one little brushstroke, one blob of colour after the next – and yet, to me, it’s everything. I’m remarkably lucky to have been able to make this my life. That’s pretty special and I don’t take any of it for granted.

Susannah Bleasby talks about being in a place where nothing quite lines up.

What her brain wants. What her gut wants. What the work is doing.

There’s honesty in naming that while you’re still in it.

This series grows through word of mouth and the creative people who nudge me toward the next conversation. If someone comes to mind whose creativity inspires you, send them my way.

Until next week, Christine