Seaside Stirrings with Susan Schmidt
Evocative cover artist Susan Schmidt invites us into a coastal lifestyle of the past, reminding us to protect the environment we’re embedded in today, as Georgia Beard discovers.
Whitecaps carrying a coastal breeze through the fly screen door; scampering barefoot across the sandy backyard in wet bathers; ice cream from the local milk bar melting in hand; kicking the sheets to the end of the bed and falling asleep to the familiar wash of waves – decades-old memories of seaside summer vacations always trail back to the fibro shack.
The ubiquitous beach house has sat on Noosa’s shores from the post-war architectural upturn of the 1950s to impending urbanisation of the 2000s.
Older generations remember when most families could afford to claim a patch of coastline and construct a cottage from fibrolite and dreams.
Now their coveted beachfront locations are bought up and bulldozed by affluent newcomers who settle in Noosa to sojourn and to stay.
Despite the changing landscape, Susan Schmidt refuses to let us forget these comforting cultural icons, bringing their memories to life on her canvas, recalling the surrounding pandanus, she-oaks and cotton trees and the quaint names nailed to cool pastel walls.
Standing proud in the Seaburbia collection, her architectural studies conserve their arctic-glass windows, metal awnings, timber steps and under-house screenings in acrylic and oil.
Her passion for preservation comes from her own memories of beach house living, most notably captured in her Love Shack artwork, when she moved with her partner after driving up to Queensland in a vintage Mercedes-Benz.
“The house in the background is the first house we bought together in 1987,” she said. “It was an old fibro fisherman’s shack on Bribie Island.”
Before shacks and shorelines, Susan spent her childhood roaming the 100 acres of her family’s dairy farm in Adelaide Hills, building cubby houses
and making as much art as possible in country isolation.
When her parents secretly entered her into an art competition on TV, she won her first set of paints and brushes, thus rousing a lifelong enthusiasm for creativity.
She went on to study graphic design and advertising, learning her way around life drawing, lettering, photography and more before finding work as an illustrator in advertising – a 13-year career taking her from Adelaide to Melbourne to Brisbane.
The transition from graphic designer to fine artist came with her move to Noosa and the arrival of her two children, Amber and Ben.
“I didn’t think advertising and a newborn child were going to be compatible,” she laughed. “With the deadlines and pressure of advertising work, there used to be a lot of all-night stints with no sleep.
“My first paintings I did on the easel were with Amber as a baby at my feet, on her mat with her toys.”
The first subjects to catch her attention were our aquamarine beaches and the flaring canopy of pandanus leaves that so often framed them.
Her coastal scenes of Noosa, Laguna Bay, K’gari and Thursday Island were the first she sold and exhibited – in Darwin in 1998 and Noosa’s Sheraton-turned-Sofitel in 2001, 2002 and 2003.
After experimenting with a series of city streetscapes, Susan noticed the gradual disappearance of the beach house and sought to document their stories and personalities in 2009.
Works from Seaburbia have since showcased across Australia, New York, Hong Kong, Istanbul, California, Singapore and most recently the Rise Art Prize ‘Global Artist of the Year’ award in London.
Local families have also commissioned her to paint their own beach houses, like the work on our front cover, Beach House Days, which still stands at Moffat Beach.
“It’s what that architecture represents more than the architecture itself – a simpler life, time out, freedom, family and the nostalgia that goes with it,” she said.
“I’ve been focusing on that subject for over ten years. They’re difficult paintings to paint because of all the perspectives and technical details in them.
“There’s a lot of layering and rubbing back, and that’s all about time and decay – creating more history and nostalgia in the works.”
“The foliage areas in the paintings will be more abstracted as a bit of a buffer or a relief from the hard-edge architectural elements.”
Although Susan will never abandon the beach house, lately her gaze has turned deeper into Noosa’s native flora, exploring the mangroves and tidal flats along the Weyba Creek trails.
After she photographs the environment, her depictions shift away from the structured composition of architecture.
Instead, she sinks into the abstract where she finds freedom and spontaneity – mangrove leaves dancing in light and shadow while roots and branches coalesce with opalescent wetlands below.
“I’m a bit of an environmentalist, which would come through in the work,” she said.
“I’m hoping people would care for these landscapes, value them and find beauty in what is often taken for granted.”
While our memories of the old coast return in the art we make, Susan’s work reminds us we can still hold on to what we have before it’s lost.
