Sue Ribbans
Describe your background
As a child, my father and I would sit at either end of the kitchen table in the evenings engrossed in our paintings. Art school was a natural progression. I learned the art of relief printmaking when I was a student at Canterbury College of Art while taking a four-year National Diploma in Design in a graphic design course in the early 1960s.
When did you become a printmaker and why?
I married a fellow student and many years later in 1989 one of our printmaking heroes Edward Bawden died which prompted us to purchase a Columbian printing press to (hopefully) carry on the fine tradition of lino cutting. Up to that point I had been fully engaged as a mother of three and the other half of a freelance graphic design partnership.
I resumed the art of lino cutting and the ‘Fat Ladies’ became the theme of my work.
The ladies began to emerge from the lino which were purely design-based and not taken from direct reference to studied drawings or photographs but rather from a background of graphic principles, knowledge of anatomy and a great deal of life drawing while a student. These ladies became my signature pieces and I successfully joined artists groups and galleries.
After parting from my husband in 2002 I did a very interesting 10-year period of teaching art in adult education which concluded when I was 70.
What is your preferred medium and why?
Over the years I developed painting skills and added sculpture to my repertoire. A trigger point in painting came in the late 1990s with a trip to Greece which inspired a body of colourful and graphic work that resulted in a solo exhibition in Richmond Council’s Riverside Gallery.
Are any members of your family artists or printmakers?
My current partner is a sculptor and my eldest daughter followed in the family footsteps and is a very accomplished printmaker.
If your house was burning down, what art would you save?
I am a great admirer of the printmaker Robert Tavener and if there was a fire I would snatch the print I have on my office wall of his Seven Sisters Beachy Head.
How do you sum up your approach to art?
I am a restless artist with a hundred ideas and not enough time to pursue them. I experiment in so many of my approaches, and I delight in the wonders of the unexpectedness, the surprises, that various techniques and materials can reveal to me.
Website sueribbans.co.uk
Instagram @sueribbans
