By Liz Hoggard
Located in a quiet square in London's East End, the artist Sue Kreitzman's house is a celebration of female creativity. Everywhere you'll find images of Josephine Baker, Frida Kahlo, Carmen Miranda and Billie Holiday. "My work is intensely personal and involves colour, food, freedom and the female landscape," she explains. "I paint imagined goddesses, close friends, female heroines, both real and mythological, and self-portraits."
The house is a brilliant showcase for the artworks created by Kreitzman and her artist friends. Walls are painted hot Mexican colours - red, yellow, orange and pink. "When it's sunny the house glows and even when it's not, it still glows." Kreitzman has also customised many furniture pieces around the house, painting chairs, tables, salvaged kitchen worktops and cabinet doors, crockery and chopping boards. "I seem to have developed a sort of graffiti complex. I want to cover every surface I come across with Technicolor scribbles." Even the lights are made from female action superheroes. One senses her husband is a tolerant man.
In fact, the couple have hit upon a novel way of co-habiting. During the week her husband, Steve, a medical researcher who runs his own health business, lives in Cambridge. But when he spends time with Sue in the East End, he has his own rather more restrained wing of the house. "He's very supportive of my work but it's nice that he has a place that he can go to when it all gets too much for him," laughs Kreitzman.
The ex-local authority property was built in the early 1970s. When the house next door came up for sale last year, the couple bought it and knocked through to create an extended living/gallery area. Thanks to the extra space, they each have their own bedroom and office, as well as a shared library. Now that their son, Shawm, is grown-up and they have paid off their mortgages, having two households is the way forward for couples she believes. "When you're so busy and obsessed, there's so much conflict because you come home tired and worried. Each of us thinks our own particular thing at the time is the most important. But this way, we can wallow in our own work, then have wonderful weekends together. We don't have to do any errands or pay bills or go shopping, because we take care of that during the week. It's just together time. It's a revelation."
Kreitzman's paintings and sculptures appear in collections in the UK, US, Paris, Germany and Italy. She has had several one-woman shows, and been part of many group shows including the legendary Raw Art Festival in London and Valencia. Untutored and obsessive, her work has many links with the Outsider art movement. As she explains, "I am deeply moved by primitive religious art and tribal art of all kinds, images and objects that have been created with passion."
Kreitzman paints on paper or on wood with nail varnish, which she buys in industrial quantities on the Roman Road ("I love really vulgar colours"). Works are embellished with buttons, broken jewellery, toys, and other bits of what she calls"profound junk". Much of her time is spent obsessively trawling for finds in markets, skips, second-hand shops and salvage yards. Friends and fans also bring her their latest treasures.
As well as her paintings, Kreitzman is known for her assemblages or "memory jugs" - glittering, iridescent female creatures covered in jewels, fripperies and found objects. These 3D collages each tell a story. Some are autobiographical; others celebrate heroines such as the late actress Mae Questel (the voice of Betty Boop and Olive Oyl), Eve, Medusa and Persephone. "Memory jugs were originally an African-American tradition, from the days of slavery right up to the beginning of the 20th century," Kreitzman explains. "These powerful works of art were homemade memorials to the dead, created by emptying the pockets of the deceased and pressing these small, personal objects on to a putty or clay-covered primitive jug. When dried, the jug was placed on the grave as a memorial."
The open-plan living room of Kreitzman's house displays work by fellow artists including Cathy Ward's creatures and a huge soft sculpture by Steve Wright, which he claims is modelled on Sue. The two funky chairs come from the Back2 shop on London's Wigmore Street, and the room is dominated by a huge wooden Ekoi head from Nigeria. "We bought it to celebrate our 45th wedding anniversary, so much more fun than a diamond eternity ring or a mink coat."
Every room of the house is testament to Sue's collecting passions - fabrics, glassware, ceramics, Day of the Dead papier mache figures. And her bathroom is a shrine to the mermaid. "The mythology of the mermaid is incredibly profound and poignant," she enthuses, "because it is about female sexuality. You find her in every culture wherever you have a coastline nearby. Plus, she's a fabulous icon to women my age, because we're post-menopausal, so no more problems down there, total freedom."
Kreitzman's workroom is a large wooden shed in the back yard. "The workman carried it through the house in pieces and built it in three hours, it was like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers." Decorated with voodoo symbols to keep away evil spirits, the shed is an Aladdin's cave of discoveries. Boxes are meticulously labelled: "hair slides", "retro badges", "Roman figures", "lips", "religion and spiritual". Although she has been making for only 11 years, she is hugely prolific, but admits she finds it hard to sell her work. "I do have separation anxiety: I have a terrible time parting with things."
An expatriate New Yorker, Kreitzman has lived in London for more than 20 years. For a long time she had a very successful career as a food writer - in the late-Eighties, she was the undisputed cooking queen of daytime TV - but after writing 27 books, she was looking for new inspiration. "The cookery fashion had changed and it was male chefs, beautiful, trendy male chefs, and then of course Nigella. It wasn't me any more. I had said everything I wanted to say about food. I needed to move on."
One day in 1996, she found herself drawing: "I swear I just picked up some colour markers and started filling notebooks. It was almost as if a violent fever had overtaken me and I became quite obsessed," she recalls. Today she paints for the "sheer visceral joy of it. The enormous impact it has had on my life has turned me into another person entirely."
Food is still a major motif in her work - from bananas to watermelons. "The watermelon is such a layered symbol of things. Of course it's a painful symbol of the bad old days of black-white relations in the 1920s and 1930s. But on the other hand it's beautiful and delicious, a very folkloric fruit. It's also an emblem of female sexuality: smooth and cool and red and juicy. Use your imagination when you bite into it," she advises The Independent's male photographer, who is already looking slightly pale.
Dressed today in a Lauren Shanley jacket and vibrant jewellery, Kreitzman is a work of art herself. The jacket is made from textile panels created by the South African embroidery co-operative Pomegranate. "If you look in my dressing room upstairs, Lauren makes all my clothes. We collaborate on many of the stories they tell. I want people to look at me and smile."
Recently Kreitzman was photographed by Street Magazine, a Japanese journal of cutting-edge fashion. "There were all these skinny teenagers and me," she laughs. She has also been immortalised in the mixed-media sculpture her artist-friend, Judith McNicol, made of her. "It's called Sue Bird with Bagel. This wonderful creature is literally made out of garbage and it has all my obsessions, from food to fish and clocks and winged creatures."
Next year she is curating the east-end show, Wild Old Women. "My latest discovery is this 76-year-old artist, Marlene Kimber; she is the most amazing nave painter." She shows me a wild canvas by Kimber: King Kong being rescued by Superman, which currently hangs on her kitchen wall. At 67, Kreitzman is not prepared to become a little old lady. "I'm not going to be invisible, that's ridiculous!" she grins." None of my friends in the arts who are getting on in years are invisible because we have a huge, loud, raucous voice that comes out through our art. We have big ideas and because we are outsiders, no one tells us what to do or how to do it."
For more information on Sue's work contact www.suekreitzman.com. In September, she will be exhibiting with artist Phil Wildman as part of the show He Says, She Says at Chichi's, London E3 (020-8141 4190)
(c) 2007 Independent, The; London (UK).