While Young Masters Art Prize starts its regular touring program at Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary, we are proud to introduce the work by our 2019 alumna Susanne Kamps. Susanne was highly commended by the Young Masters Art Prize and ACS, and we talked to her about the work she had created for the Prize – Behind the Screen. This amazing artwork is now available for sale at the Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary art fair in Miami.
Susanne Kamps in her studio.
In your artistic practice you often pay homage to Henri Matisse. What attracts you to him? What are your other sources of inspiration?
Matisse’s colours are the attraction – and I think I’m not alone there. Maybe I am different from other admirers in that I’ve made some Matisse pilgrimages – to see the church windows near St. Paul, for example. It’s that one particular range of Matisse colours – the green-to-tourquise shades – that grab me the most. As far as others, just about any painter that uses strong colours in a composition with clear shapes piques my interest. Hockney, Fantin-Latour, Wayne Thibaud – these were inspirations for other works that I submitted for the Young Masters Art Prize.
In 2019 you won one of the awards of the Young Masters Art Prize. What did this experience give you?
The Young Masters Art Prize was a fantastic experience for me. I think it gave me a new awareness of how artists are influenced by the past. I mean others, besides myself, the other artists who won recognition – women and men from so many different countries with different languages but united in their work by this pull from the past. The prize certainly has the right theme.
What were your thoughts when you learned that your artwork Behind The Screen was chosen by Cynthia Corbett for the Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary art fair in 2020?
Surprise. I painted the picture especially for the Young Master competition only a short time before. So soon after the moment of creation, nobody thinks about recognition – you are focused on the baby you’ve just had, absorbed in it, wondering why you gave it this or that characteristic. What you might change if you painted it again. And then somebody else likes it – somebody in the art world like Cynthia. My husband doesn’t count – he says he likes all my paintings (I think he really does).
Susanne Kamps, Behind the Screen, 2019. Oil on canvas.
Could you tell us a bit more about Behind The Screen? How did this spectacular diptych come to life?
I had done the right side – the ideal Paris interior with windows looking out in two directions – un appartement à l’angle – not easy to find! – and I put my two cats on the sofa. Then the left side – it struck me to paint a paravent (screen) that I had actually painted in wood and sold years ago. Very Matisse, to paint an old work into a new one, and not only Matisse of course. The coup was the nude female shadow figure to unite the two halves. I frankly don’t know where I got that idea but I think it works.
The Young Masters Tour program 2020 is available here.