Camille Souter obituary: Visual artist who restlessly explored painting

Born: October 22nd, 1929

Died: March 3rd, 2023

From her earliest exhibitions onwards Camille Souter gained a reputation as an artist of outstanding quality, highly respected by her peers and revered by the wider visual art audience. This despite the fact that she shunned the limelight and guarded her privacy, being famously reluctant to exhibit her work. She approached each painting as a new world to explore, never settling for the hackneyed and predictable as she ranged through such ostensibly familiar genres as still life, domestic interiors, landscape and, more rarely, the figure. In each, she tended towards unconventional subject matter and motifs: wildflower blossom in a jam jar; shabby, post-industrial canal banks; aircraft and runways at Shannon Airport; electricity pylons marching across agricultural land; pitiful slain creatures in the abattoir. She made of each a glowing, radiant picture, echoing the haiku poet Basho’s observation: “There is nothing you can see that is not a flower.”

She was born Betty Pamela Holmes in Northampton, to Warren Holmes and Kathleen (née Hamblin). A few years later, her father, an ex-Royal Navy submariner, was sent to Dublin to manage the local branch of a shoe machinery manufacturing company. Living in Glenageary, she attended Glengara Park School, where she was not that focused academically but keen on art classes. She failed her Leaving Cert on the basis of her poor Irish but also sat the Cambridge Certificate exam, paving the way to study nursing at Guy’s Hospital in London. There she encountered airmen horribly scarred from the war, an experience that resurfaced in her painting much later on. She relished the lively, postwar energy of Soho but, on returning from a visit to Italy, was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

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As she recalled it, given her training she was less alarmed than she might have been. Still, she had to spend a recuperative year in a sanatorium on the Isle of Wight which was, she said, like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. “Just imagine,” she commented looking back, “being given a year just to read and think.” What she didn’t do was paint, but before returning to nursing she spent a while in Glenageary and took sculpture classes with Yann Renard Goulet. Back in London to complete her nursing studies, she settled enthusiastically into Soho life, abruptly decided painting rather than sculpture was for her, married actor Gordon Souter and had the first of her five children, Natasha. One of their Soho set, Les Ure, christened her Camille after Alexandre Dumas’s tubercular heroine The Lady of the Camellias.

Ure may well have noticed that, if shy, with an air of dreamy abstraction about her, she had a strong, theatrical sense of her own persona. That came to include a distinctive wardrobe style, including a beret (hence Paul Durcan’s allusion to the artist “blinking up out from under her black beret”), long, elegant cardigans, beads and a scarf providing a judicious dash of colour. In any case, splitting from her husband, she went to Italy with Ralph Rumney. Rumney, then a capable painter and a perpetual nomad, moved easily through the echelons of the art world and was soon to co-found the influential Situationist International. While they were not together that long, he was a significant example for Souter, encouraging her to take herself seriously as an artist and focus on her work, which she did from then on, regardless of the paucity of her circumstances.

Her first solo show was in Dublin in 1956. She moved restlessly, mainly between Ireland and Italy. During this period, she and the sculptor Frank Morris met by chance and were instantly, mutually smitten. They married in 1960. By then she had spent time working on Achill, which held an irresistible appeal for her. Through the 1950s she had been attentive to developments in international painting, including abstract expressionism and, more especially, European tachisme, including work by the CoBrA group artists. Paul Klee and, later, Pierre Bonnard also impressed her. But she wasn’t overwhelmed by any of what she encountered. Rather she absorbed what she needed and applied practical aspects of it to her own vision of her Irish environment, usually on a relatively modest scale.

She and Morris and their growing family moved into in a small farmhouse on Calary Bog in Wicklow, immediately facing into the harsh winter of 1962. Money remained scarce and conditions were spartan, but she explored rich veins of work throughout the decade, finding her mature mode of subtly though skilfully coloured, tonally rich, luminously lit, superbly tactile painting. Sadly, Morris died suddenly following an appendectomy in 1970, from unsuspected haemochromatosis. That she began to paint slaughterhouses subsequently was, she said, entirely coincidental.

In a sense she eventually settled on Achill, in a cottage on the shore at Dooagh, with nearby, supportive artist neighbours Margaret Morrisson and John McHugh, though settled is a relative term for someone as perpetually restless as Souter. She was forever setting off somewhere, in Ireland or abroad, and was adept at setting up temporary studio spaces wherever she wanted to paint. In the late 1970s she had signed up for flying lessons to get access airside at Shannon Airport.

She was fortunate in finding perceptive and sympathetic gallerists in Leo Smith and, following his death, John and Pat Taylor. The collector Basil Goulding was an early supporter, as he was for so many artists at the time. A survey show at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1980 gave a sense of her formidable artistic achievement to date. She agreed to a 1999 retrospective show in Drogheda because it paired her with Nano Reid, whose work she held in high regard. A close friend, Barrie Cooke, persuaded her to commit to a retrospective at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo in 2001. She assented because the venue was in the west. Garrett Cormican’s comprehensive, fully illustrated study of the artist was published in 2006. She was elected a Saoi of Aosdána in 2009.

She is survived by her daughters Natasha, Michele, Gino and Emma and her son Tim, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.