Camille Souter: life and works

Camille Souter, born Betty Pamela Holmes, is a painter. Though born in Northampton, England, in 1929, she was raised in Ireland.

Souter originally trained as a nurse and began painting during the 1950s even if recovering from illness. Her name ‘”Camille” is actually a nickname fixed idea to her by first husband Gordon Souter in reference to the consumptive heroine of Alexandre Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias.

Although largely self-taught, Souter took happening sculpture in 1950 and was trained by Jean Goullet. In 1953 Souter began to investigate the medium of paint after visiting Italy. She travelled extensively in Europe and held her first solo exhibition in Dublin in 1956.

In 1957 the Clog Gallery in Dublin staged a solo exhibition of Souter’s work, a mixture of oils, gouache and monotypes.

Souter had works simultaneously in a two-person exhibition afterward Barrie Cooke at the Ulster Museum in 1965, whilst with showing eight works at the New Gallery upon Belfast’s Grosvenor Road, including Northern Plains (Winter), Town Creeping Out, and Trains and All That.

In 1971 four of Souter’s works were included in The Irish Imagination 1959-1971 in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, which higher in the same year travelled to Washington to publicize of Irish Culture abroad.

Camille Souter captures spacious and colour, texture and form in intimate on the order of abstract paintings of terse subjects, her subject event has included landscapes, still lifes and slaughterhouses. In a review of Camille Souter’s joint play a role with Nano Reid in 1999, Vona Groarke wrote “Camille Souter’s paintings have a statuesque elegance to them, even once the subject is something as banal as silage bags. She is an artiste who avoids prettiness though seeking beauty.”

The Bank of Ireland held her painting Over the Bog, created in 1962. This painting was donated by the bank in 2008 to the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

The Douglas Hyde Gallery held a retrospective of her undertaking in 1980.

Souter has won many awards including the Tony O’Malley honor in 1998, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Distinguished Career Award in 2000. In 2015, Trinity College Dublin awarded her like an honorary doctorate.

She was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 2008. Souter lives upon Achill Island.

Her works can be seen in many public and private collections including the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Ulster Museum, Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Arts Council of Ireland collection.