By Caroline Parkes — A guest blog for The Musings of Spu

This month I’ve given my blog over to one of my closest friends who recently painted a portrait of me. It’s a deeply personal reflection of our friendship & Breast Cancer.

Suzanne’s portrait 

Alt text: A colourful acrylic and oil portrait of a white middle aged woman seated in her wheelchair against a golden background. She has strawberry-blonde hair, raspberry-coloured glasses perched on her head, bright blue eyeliner and long dangling earrings. She wears a sky-blue jumpsuit patterned with tiny white perfume bottles, inspired by her own artwork and a heart-shaped Vera Wang perfume bottle. One hand rests on the wheel of her chair, while the other rests on her lap. She looks directly at the viewer with a calm, assured expression.

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I’ve known Suzanne Cony-Bull MBE since we were seven years old. Nearly fifty years later, I found myself sitting opposite her, looking at her in a way I never had before. I was going to paint her portrait. YIKES!

I’m Caroline Parkes, an artist based in Woodstock, Oxfordshire. Suzanne and I met at Pilgrims Hatch Primary School in Brentwood, Essex. We were the kind of teenagers who identified with Pretty In Pink, firmly in the Andie and Ducky crowd. We loved The Cure, and played together in the school orchestra, band and choir, and enjoyed gigs and festivals and all round music fuelled merriment. 

Like many lifelong friendships, ours has ebbed and flowed over the decades. We’ve gone through periods of seeing lots of each other and others when life has taken us in different directions. Suzanne has always been far better than me at keeping those connections alive. She remembers birthdays, sends cards and brings people together. During lockdown, she organised Zoom calls with our old ‘Hedley Deadly’ friends, reconnecting people who hadn’t seen each other for years.

So when I began working on a series of portraits of people who I admired, people who oozed creativity and attitude, Suzanne was an obvious choice. And, if I’m honest, one of the people I felt most nervous about asking!

Creativity as an act of optimism

Suzanne’s portrait in situ at Blenheim Palace

Alt text: Wide-angle photograph of The Optimists exhibition at Blenheim Palace. A series of colourful paintings hangs across sage-green walls in a light-filled gallery café, the Stables, Blenheim Palace, with wooden tables and chairs beneath. Suzanne Cony-Bull’s portrait is near the centre, showing her in a blue patterned jumpsuit against a golden background. On the right, a large, vividly coloured painting of two dogs by MM Plumm surrounded by flowers dominates the wall.

Photo credit: Pete Seaward

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The portrait is part of The Optimists, an exhibition at Blenheim Palace that I’ve created with my friend and fellow artist Morgan, who goes by the artist non de plume MM Plumm.

The exhibition grew out of a series of walks around the lake at Blenheim Palace, where I live (well, to be clear, I don’t actually live IN Blenheim Palace, but in the small town next to it…I can but dream!). Morgan and I had both started painting when we were navigating grief, and we talked about about the importance of creativity. Not just making beautiful things, but what creating something can do for you when life is complicated, uncertain or difficult.

Our exhibition is about creativity as an act of optimism. Not optimism in the sense of pretending everything is wonderful, but in the decision to keep making, imagining, connecting and finding joy.

Our paintings are very different, but we share a love of colour, individuality and the people and stories that make life interesting. We wanted to create an exhibition that was big, bold, colourful and full of life.

My contribution is a series of large-scale portraits of people with whom I have a personal connection. Some I’ve known for decades, others I’ve met more recently. They’re people I find fascinating, visually or creatively interesting, people who have influenced me, encouraged me, or simply made my world a richer place.

Each portrait begins with a conversation. I spend time with the person, photograph them, and try to understand something about how they see themselves and the world. The resulting painting is not simply about capturing a likeness. I want it to tell a little of their story, too. So I call them Portrait Stories.

Which brings me back to Suzanne.

Painting Spu

I’ve known for years how important it is to Suzanne that disabled people are represented on their own terms. She has spent much of her life challenging assumptions about disability, from how she showed up at school, to in the pub at Uni, and then through founding Attitude is Everything, the organisation that transformed access to live music for Deaf and disabled people.

She’s also very clear about the language she doesn’t like. Words such as ‘brave’ and ‘inspirational’ are not necessarily compliments when they’re used simply because someone is disabled. I’ve seen her challenge that kind of language on LinkedIn, and I’ve always respected her directness. But it did make me slightly apprehensive about asking to paint her.

I knew that Suzanne had already been the subject of another artist’s portrait, which I’d seen and really admired. Michelle Baharier  painted Suzanne for her “Filling The Gaps” exhibition which featured portraits of disabled activists, and her portrait caught Suzanne in a conversational cup of tea mode. It captured something her through Michelle’s eyes, with her far more experienced expertise.

When I saw Suzanne’s LinkedIn post it really did give me that extra bit of pressure! How could I make something that felt recognisably Suzanne, while also being recognisably my work? How could I tell Suzanne’s story, in my way, that really honoured her and our friendship?

A summer afternoon

I visited Suzanne at home on a very hot summer’s day. We had a lovely lunch with her husband, Stéphane, and talked about their recent wedding, which I’d been lucky enough to attend.

It had been a wonderful occasion, full of music, laughter, a conga, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine and connection with old friends. I had wondered about painting Suzanne in her wedding reception outfit (it was ALL kinds of fabulous) but she had a strong point of view on this, and wanted something less personal, but still very her. 

When we came to the sitting she appeared in a beautiful pale sky-blue jumpsuit, covered in a delicate white floral pattern. It struck me that Suzanne has two rather different sides to her style. There’s the indie-goth music lover, and there’s the stylish woman who appeared in front of my camera that afternoon.

I asked how she’d like to be portrayed. Her answer was simple.

“Strong.”

That influenced the way I photographed her. I positioned myself slightly below her eyeline, so she was looking down towards me, with one arm resting on the wheel of her chair. We tried several poses, and spent a while talking about our shared history, Suzanne’s creativity, the things that really matter to her.

There was something very simple about the pose. Not theatrical or exaggerated, but definitely strong. 

Seeing Sandra again

One of the things I hadn’t anticipated was how emotional the process of looking so closely at Suzanne would be. When you’re painting somebody, you spend hours studying their face. You notice the shape of their eyes, the shadows around their mouth, the way their skin changes colour, and all the tiny details that make them unmistakably themselves.

And as I began painting Suzanne, I kept seeing her mum, Sandra. Sandra died of breast cancer when we were sixteen. I remember her from our childhood, and it was really moving to realise how much of her I could now see in Suzanne’s face,  almost as though Sandra was shining through Suzanne’s skin. I don’t think I would have noticed it quite if I hadn’t been painting her.

Breast cancer has also shaped my own life. Years after Sandra died, and after Suzanne had also received a breast cancer diagnosis, my sister developed breast cancer and subsequently died. Suzanne was an important source of support to me during that time, for which I’ll be forever grateful.

There is something about having known someone since childhood that makes those shared experiences particularly powerful. We’ve known each other through different versions of ourselves, through all the things we’ve become, and through losses we could never have imagined when we were seven-year-old girls at school.

I’ve often thought about how friendships change over time. You can go months without seeing someone, sometimes longer, and yet there are people who remain part of the fabric of your life. Suzanne is one of those people for me.

Painting her made me think about that shared history in a way I hadn’t before. It also reminded me that the people we lose don’t entirely disappear. Sometimes we catch glimpses of them in the faces, expressions and gestures of those they leave behind. I love that when I look at my painting of Suzanne, I can see Sandra there too.

The scent of a mosh pit

Scent of my Family by Suzanne Cony-Bull 

Alt text: A 3D artwork by Suzanne Cony-Bull consisting of a collection of familiar everyday items, liquids, and scent profiles packaged into jars and containers, each representing a specific family member or shared household memories. It features specific, evocative elements like the artist’s father’s dynamic aftershave, her partner’s preferred coffee, the distinct scent of her mother’s favorite hand creams, and even the comforting smells of home-cooked meals. The piece highlighted how, during the lockdowns, everyday aromas became incredibly heightened anchors of comfort when physical touch and face-to-face family gatherings were restricted.

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Of course, our conversation wasn’t all about the emosh stuff. Suzanne is one of the funniest people I know. She’s erudite, direct, opinionated and often absolutely hilarious. And one of my favourite moments of our afternoon gave the painting its title.

During lockdown, Suzanne had been making her own artwork. One of her pieces was selected for Grayson Perry’s Art Club, responding to a theme about family. She had created a series of bottles containing imaginary fragrances, each representing the scent of a different member of her family.

So I asked Suzanne what her own scent would be. Without a moment’s hesitation, she replied:

“The scent of a mosh pit!”

I laughed out loud. SO Spu.

And suddenly, not only did  I have the title of the painting, I had the idea for my Portrait Story.

The story is in the detail.

One of the things I enjoy most about painting portraits is finding ways to include little clues about the person within the painting itself. Suzanne had talked to me about her family fragrance artwork, and I began wondering whether I could incorporate those bottles into the portrait. She’d also shown me a bottle of Vera Wang Princess perfume, a beautiful heart-shaped bottle with a tiny crown.

Suzanne’s portrait 

Then I looked again at the little white flowers on her blue jumpsuit. What if they weren’t flowers at all? What if they were tiny perfume bottles? So that’s what I painted.

The pattern on Suzanne’s jumpsuit is made up of little white silhouettes inspired by the bottles from her Art Club artwork, mixed with the heart-shaped Vera Wang bottle. From a distance, they look like an ordinary decorative fabric pattern. But when you get closer, you begin to discover another part of Suzanne’s story. I also changed her earrings into a little perfume bottle. 

We talked about make-up, too. Suzanne was wearing blue liquid eyeliner, which I’d also used in my own self-portrait. I wanted to make a real feature of that with an almost graphic approach to her painting. 

I leaned into the strawberry-blonde warmth of her hair, the fabulous glasses perched on her head and the distinctive shapes of her jewellery.

And I made the decision to place her against a gold background. Most of my portraits have relatively simple, single-colour backgrounds. I like the way that gives the person space to dominate the painting.I can’t pretend there was a grand conceptual reason for choosing gold. I just hought it looked glorious against the blue. Maybe, just maybe, there was the Essex connection too. Us Essex ladies  love a bit of gold! But afterwards, several people commented that the painting reminded them of a religious icon, or a traditional Russian painting, with Suzanne appearing almost regal against the gold.

That hadn’t been my intention, but I kind of like it! 

Seeing herself on the wall

I was disappointed that Suzanne couldn’t make the private view of The Optimists. There were several people I would have loved to have there who couldn’t come, but I was particularly sorry that Suzanne wasn’t among the faces in the room.

And then I discovered that the weekend she’s planning to visit is a weekend when I’ll be away at the Hay Literary Festival. So I won’t get to stand beside her when she sees the painting in real life for the first time. Gutted!

But on the evening of the private view, before the doors opened, I managed to have a WhatsApp video call with her. I showed her the painting hanging on the wall at Blenheim, talked her through the little details, the perfume bottles, the earrings and all the things that had found their way into the work. It was a lovely moment for me, and I hope for her. And I’m really looking forward to hearing what she thinks when she finally stands in front of it.

There’s something quite special about seeing someone you love represented at that scale, in a place as magnificent as Blenheim Palace.

And there she is, one of my oldest friends, looking utterly regal against a gold background.

I’ve known Suzanne since we were seven. I’ve watched her grow into the woman she is today, just as she’s watched me grow into the woman I’ve become. But painting her has made me see her differently. Perhaps that’s the real joy of portraiture. It’s not just about recording what somebody looks like. It’s about taking the time to really see them.

And now I find myself wondering who will paint Suzanne next. Because somebody absolutely should!

Suzanne and Caroline at Blenheim Palace

Alt text: Two female friends, smiling together on a sunny day beside a lake at Blenheim Palace. One, a white middle aged woman with bobbed blonde hair sits in her wheelchair wearing sunglasses, a black leather biker jacket and navy trousers, while the other (a white middle aged woman with long brown hair)  kneels beside her wearing oversized black glasses, a navy-and-white striped top and jeans. They lean affectionately towards one another on the grass, surrounded by lush greenery beneath a bright blue sky. A colourful picnic plate and cup sit in the foreground.

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The Optimists is on at Blenheim Palace until February 2027. Admission requires a palace ticket but it’s a great day out that I can thoroughly recommend, especially with the Christmas festivities there. 

Please read more about my art at www.carolineparkes.art

And follow me on Instagram @carolineparkesart

If you know someone who would like their own Portrait Story, I take commissions. And if you’d like Suzanne’s portrait on your wall, it is available for sale. Please drop me a line on caro.parkes@googlemail.com