Sue Kreitzman

I am an expatriate New Yorker, living in London for many years. I've had a long and successful career as a food writer, but something happened in 1998 (I'm still not sure what) and I stopped writing and cooking, and began drawing, painting, and building assemblages instead. It was as if a violent fever had overtaken me (a fever which still rages), made all the more mysterious by the fact that I had never done such a thing before.

My work is completely untutored (as far as technique and materials are concerned, I make it up as I go along), intensely personal and involves colour, food, freedom and the female landscape. I fashion imagined Goddesses, glimpsed strangers, close friends, my personal female heroines, real and mythological - Josephine Baker, Frida Kahlo, Eve, Medusa - and self-portraits, and I adorn these powerful female images with profound symbols crafted from junk.

I am deeply moved by primitive religious and tribal art of all kinds. Images and objects that have been created with passion take on immense power.

I paint on paper or on found wood, with acrylics and nail varnish. Many of the works on wood are embellished with buttons, broken jewelry, toys, and other bits of profound junk (I have a deep and abiding passion for profound junk).

I also build assemblages and memory jugs out of my vast hoards of detritus. Half my time is spent obsessively trawling for junk, and the other half, obsessively putting it all together. At this time I'm creating for the sheer visceral joy of it. The enormous impact it has had on my life has turned me into another person entirely.

http://www.suekreitzman.com