Susan Laughton worked in architecture for twelve years before returning to education to study Fine Art, graduating with a BA Hons in 2002. Her work has been selected for the Royal West of England Academy Drawn exhibition, the Royal Scottish Academy Annual exhibition and Fully Awake 5:6 at the Freelands Foundation, London. She was shortlisted for the Lichfield Art Prize in 2016, and the John Moores Painting Prize at Walker Gallery, Liverpool, in 2012. Her work is held in private collections in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia.
Susan Laughton’s background as an architecture technician is reflected in her painting, which takes flat, structural shapes and an almost mathematical approach to line to create remembered impressions and fleeting glimpses of rural and urban landscapes. She works in acrylic on wood, or canvases primed with plaster, a surface which absorbs layers of paint and allows pigmentation to vary so that objects emerge and recede on the picture plane. Restraint, simplicity of form and an understanding of the spatial potential of line give these works a rare purity and quiet power.