Pictures of Susan

Overview

Pictures of Susan is a 2012 feature documentary by Dan Salmon. The film examines the artist’s upbringing and earliest works, her twenty-year dormant period and the recent resurgence in interest from the art world for her idiosyncratic drawings since resuming in 2008. Auckland ‘outsider artist’ Susan King stopped talking when she was four. Her grandmother recognised the little girl’s talent for drawing and kept her supplied with coloured pencils and paper. For 20 years Susan expressed herself in thousands of artworks filled with playfulness, curiosity and terror. Then one day she suddenly stopped drawing. Her pictures were carefully packed away into boxes, under the bed and in the attic. There were two decades of silence, before she drew again. Today, the dealer world has discovered Susan’s art brut. A series of exhibitions, have garnered international demand for Susan’s art, but leaves an ethical quandary for the family who can only guess at Susan's wishes.