A HAYDON WICK artist is using art to help sick people tell the stories of their lives.

Painter Susan Carr is one of 60 artists displaying their work this month as part of Swindon Open Studios.

This weekend visitors to the Swindon Museum and Art Gallery can see her stunning portraits of patients painted at the Prospect Hospice, in Wroughton.

It is the last chance to see portrait therapist Susan’s exhibition at the Bath Road museum.

Susan, 54, who holds a PhD in portrait therapy from Loughborough University, said: “Through the project, patients were able to tell me their stories – tales they’d waited a lifetime to tell.”

She spent time with seven hospice patients and the result was a collection of 29 painted portraits, six sculptures and 80 collages.

Susan, who studied at Swindon College of Art before later doing a masters degree in art therapy at Hertfordshire University, sat with the hospice patients, speaking to them about their lives.

“The patients I worked with all had extraordinary stories we could develop together,” she said.

Some of the most striking stories belonged to Second World War veteran Bill, then aged 92.

“When I started working with Bill all he talked about was his war experience,” said Susan.

“He was this amazing hero who flew massive gliders full of trips into the Battle of Arnhem. He’d been shot in the lung and thrown on to a tree.”

Bill was captured by German troops and sent to Stalag 11B prisoner-of-war camp.

Susan said: “All of those things told me everything I needed to know about what had made him, broken him, then remade him.”

The artist painted Bill as a brave-faced young soldier and as an older veteran.

The paintings feature in her Swindon Museum exhibition – and will be recreated in a book of the exhibition, published at the end of September.

She said: “I paint wherever I can. Mostly it’s on location.”

As a ‘plein air’ painter, Susan paints alongside her partner Terry Humphries in the great outdoors.

“We’ve painted a lot in Town Gardens,” she said. “There are so many wonderful places around Swindon to paint. We’re never short of ideas.”

Susan is next hoping for an Arts Council grant to take her exhibition of hospice portraits around the UK.

She will also be teaching courses at Every Cloud ,in Stanton Park, using art therapy to cope with bereavement.

She said: “One of my patients said, ‘It helps you remember yourself, who you were and who you still are.’”

Susan exhibition Paint Me This Way is at Swindon Museum and Art Gallery on Saturday, September 9 to Sunday, September 10 from 10am to 5pm.

She will also open her studio on Wednesday, September 13, 6pm to 8pm and Sunday, September 17, 10am to 5pm for Swindon Open Studios: Studio 24, Helmsdale, Greenmeadow, SN25 1PN.

Swindon Open Studios runs until September 17.