Never Too Late

After an exciting career as a theatre designer, Susan Benson turns her attention to the people and landscape of Salt Spring Island.

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On Salt Spring Island, it’s easy to feel haunted by the ghosts of personalities past. You constantly spot people who look like they used to be someone, or perhaps still are. Faces in local stores seem familiar, like a new photo of an aging relative you haven't seen in years. Was that Valdy? Raffi? Randy Bachman?

Which brings us to Susan Benson, not quite a household name, but certainly a woman with an interesting past. She worked for decades as a theatre designer, creating costumes and stage sets, most notably for the Stratford Festival.

Over the years, she rubbed shoulders with stars like Maggie Smith, Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn. Many of the productions she worked on were shown on CBC Television. One, The Mikado, toured to London’s Old Vic theatre back in the 1980s.

But when Benson moved with her husband seven years ago to Salt Spring Island, a quick ferry ride from Victoria, she decided to devote herself to her own art practice.

A show of her landscape drawings is on view until June 26 at the island's Duthie Gallery. Simply titled New Work, it includes two large pastels of Salt Spring as seen from the water. Long and horizontal, they float in a larger sheet of blank paper.

Benson says she was drawn to the format when she realized how much of what we see nowadays is a fragment of a larger whole, either glimpsed through a car windshield or viewed on the screen of a smart phone.

“The white paper defines the image,” she says. “It’s the framework of the car windshield, if you like, defining the small area. I often elongate the image to make that more extreme.”

Benson, who attended art school in Britain before moving with her family to Canada in 1966, also enjoys portraiture. A recent project featured mostly small paintings of 174 people who live on Salt Spring. Most are ordinary folks she asked to pose after she saw them around town

“So often we go into a store, we’re served by somebody in a restaurant, we go to recycling and we don’t really look at people,” she says. “I wanted to do this patchwork of portraits of people here.”

The series includes a homeless guy who resembles Gandalf and at least one notable personality – the late Arthur Black, an ebullient CBC Radio host.

It's a busy time for Benson. She is just back from a book tour to promote Susan Benson: Art, Design and Craft on Stage. Written by Patricia Flood, a professor at the University of Guelph, it was published earlier this year by Firefly Books. It’s loaded with images, both of stage productions and Benson’s sketches.

Benson worked freelance for most of her career. Her clients included the San Francisco Opera, the National Ballet of Canada and the Canadian Opera Company. She won many prizes, including eight Dora Mavor Moore Awards, which honour theatre, dance and opera productions in Toronto.

But she now relishes the chance to dig deep and push her own work. She is intrigued by motion – designing for theatre, after all, is really about movement – and is figuring out how to capture that in pastels.

“I still want to experiment even though I’m at the age I am,” says Benson. “I still want to play. In fact, what I want to do with these pastels, which is another leap, is to push that feeling of movement, of going past something. I think I can do it with pastels, but I haven’t got to that point yet.” ■

Susan Benson: New Work is on view at the Duthie Gallery on Salt Spring Island from June 9 to June 26, 2019.

Duthie Gallery

125 Churchill Road, Ganges, British Columbia V8K 2R3

250-537-9606

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