Mastering the art of deception
Review Copyist Susie Ray can forensically replicate a Monet or Gauguin. It’s a skill that comes with consequences, she tells India Sturgis
Walk down the corridor into artist Susie Ray’s studio on the Cornish coast and you will pass a number of empty frames hanging on the walls, between smiling photographs of her two daughters.
For one of the pioneers of the copyist art movement, who is able to reproduce the richness of a Monet as easily as the smooth patina of a Caravaggio, it seems a strange oversight. “I just never got around to filling some of them,” says Ray, with a shrug. “I don’t have any of my own knocking around. I just wish I could paint a bit faster. As soon as I finish them, they go.”
The problem, if you can call it such, is that Ray is a woman in great demand. During her 30 years as one of the world’s pre-eminent copyists she has sold to private collectors, A-listers and museums around the world. There have been “Susie Ray Originals” exhibitions on the works of Renoir, Monet, Caravaggio, Stubbs, Gauguin and Modigliani and she was appointed artist-in-residence at the British Museum for the exhibition
in 1990. She has since retreated from London to Padstow, where she tucks herself away in a linseed-soaked studio to faithfully and forensically recreate everything from the Impressionists (her specialist genre) to Old Masters.
When I visit on a slate-grey afternoon, a half-finished Monet and a Samuel Peploe stand on easels amid a clutter of turpentine bottles, brush jars and bookcases buckling under the weight of tomes on Rothko, Sargent and Vermeer. But whether you believe imitation to be the sincerest form of flattery or not, Ray is keen to outline the distinction between copying and forgery.
“I’m a copyist and there is no intention to deceive,” she says. “From the front, I make it look as authentic as possible, with the artist’s signature, but from the back you can see the canvas is new and I sign my name there.”
Her reproductions are priced by how long they require to paint, something that can range from a few hundred pounds for a sketch to £12,000 for an elaborate oil taking months. Buyers include those who want to save on house insurance, so store the original in a bank vault and display Ray’s; collectors who send pieces on tour and want to fill the hole left behind; those who sold the original and want a reminder of what was once owned; and art lovers of all kinds.
Famous clientele have ranged from Marco Pierre White and the former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke to Dame Edna Everage, who requested Van Gogh’s – not to mention many more she can’t name.
But her latest challenge comes from Sky. This week, a new series entitled begins, in which we see Ray asked to copy a famous artist’s work to be hidden in an exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery. The public, along with experts, including a couple of ex-forgers, were invited to see if they could pick hers from the originals. Without giving too much away, Ray passed with flying colours.
For commissions, she has just two rules: she never paints more than one of each copy – “I put so much time and effort into each one, I just couldn’t do it again” – and adheres strictly to copyright laws, which permit copying 70 years after the original artist has died. “Anyone who died in 1946 is now fair game. [Pierre] Bonnard is next, which is brilliant, because his colours are amazing.”
Despite demand, completing each canvas is such a painstaking, slow process that it is far from lucrative. The paints need to be sourced, days of research completed, marble dust added to oils to achieve the eradefining chalky consistency, primers used in particular ways to support the right brushstrokes, while a projector beams the original image on to a canvas to help her with the outline.
Hasn’t she ever been tempted to just pass off one as the real thing? “No,” Ray answers swiftly, “because when I started doing this there were an awful lot of forgers, then they all died. They all had really nasty endings, you know, dead at the bottom of some steps stuff. It’s a really nasty underworld and I have been approached by some really shifty guys who have asked me to do stuff in the past. You would never be able to sleep working for them.”
Still, a thriving black market persists: according to a Swiss artresearch lab, more than 70 per cent of the works it analyses turn out to be fakes, forgeries or misattributions.
Unsurprisingly, once bought, many clients palm off a Susie Ray as the real thing. She has one story about a wealthy widow of an art collector, who was dividing her late husband’s collection among his family when a battle between her stepchildren commenced over certain pieces. She called in Ray to discreetly replicate some other “big, important” works that she was hanging on to. “Mine were put back in the original frames – even though they had my name on the back – and she sold the originals. When she finally kicks the bucket and they come off the wall, the family will think, ‘Oh, that’s going to be another so-manymillion’ but it’s going to say, ‘Copied by Susie Ray’ on the back.”
Four years ago, Ray opened the UK’s first copyist gallery in Padstow. Though she has since closed it to focus on teaching and commissions, it is a fitting spot to settle, given that she was raised in Cornwall and attended a local convent school. Stints at Chelsea College of Art and Middlesex Polytechnic followed, where she earned a first-class degree in scientific illustration and developed a love of faithfully reproducing plants. “We learnt all the traditional skills and methods of how to draw. It didn’t have to look pretty, it had to be absolutely, photographically accurate.”
One of her first jobs was as a botanical illustrator for Kew Gardens and illustrating seashore guidebooks for Collins Gems, although neither paid well. It was a trip to Australia, where she was asked by someone to paint Monet’s that opened her eyes to how popular copyist work could be. But she is one of a “dying breed”, as the requisite skills aren’t taught any longer.
“Students aren’t guided. They are just told to come back at the end of the term with a piece of resin or something on a rag. There is no skill. I can appreciate something contemporary, but not very often.”
Indeed, mention Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst and she balks slightly. Hasn’t she ever wanted to test her own creativity? “It’s the way I look,” she says. “It is totally representational. It is a completely different discipline.”
Perhaps, after a lifetime spent tasting caviar, it would be like trying to survive on crab sticks. “You are in awe of [artists], really,” she reflects. “You have to be. If you’re not, then I don’t think you could do the copy because, why would you?”