Sue Strizek

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Sue was a first-time exhibitor in the 2024 Lester Prize with her portrait "You can call me Viktor Stronger".

Sue is an emerging artist who draws with pen and highlights in paint stick. Her acrylic painting is on canvas and paper.

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Sue Strizek (BA Australian History Grad. Dip Ed) was a first-time exhibitor in the 2024 Lester Prize, having invested in daily art practice since 2023 that is energetic, unapologetic, and intentional through pen, with pops of colour in acrylic or watercolour mediums.

Born in the NSW outback town, Broken Hill, Sue moved to outback WA in 1996 after serving in the RAAF as an officer. Sue attended a community TAFE drawing class in Kalgoorlie, which saw her receive a ‘Highly Commended’ prize for her work on butchers’ paper, ‘Ink with Sticks’ (1997).

Sue describes her artistic practice as intense and, more often she works from her intuition.
"The magic of immediacy can fill me with an intensity that I transmitted to the paper. My pen drawings vary from sparse and pared back to a riot of suggested detail."

 

Her 2024 Lester Prize finalist portrait “You Can Call me Viktor Stronger” attracted the judge's attention due to its immediacy and the innovative use of mediums both affordable and approachable.

When painting on paper Sue’s palette work is at times brutal, and this contributes to the texture of a work. Paper is flimsy, sometimes rough, coarse, and frail at the same time and this contributes to how her works are received by the viewer.

Drawing quickly and energetically with a pen, highlighting with colour sticks, Sue's fast method of drawing is pure instinct, brain and hands working in sync. The pen is jagged, with scratching’s and suggestions.  Sue paints with acrylic paint sticks and traditional acrylic paints.  She rarely uses a brush and prefers finger painting or using a palette knife.  The Pansy Series of prints were finger painted on paper.  They are heavily layered and elemental in their texture.  Sue decided that the Pansy Series captured her abstract style and her moody colour palette perfectly and she decided to release them as a limited series of prints.

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Sue’s studio is based in Dunsborough, Western Australia and she will be participating in Margaret River Open Studios in September 2025.