The Queen’s face is retiring from our coins. The B.C. artist behind the portrait isn’t going anywhere

Susanna Blunt was born above a bank.

It was the 1940s, and her parents were working for HSBC in the northern Chinese city of Harbin, where executives were granted penthouse apartments.

It’s a neat biographical detail that suggests the hand of destiny at work in the North Vancouver artist’s life, guiding her to a career that has placed millions of copies of her work in every bank in Canada.

After two decades, Blunt’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth II that has appeared on all Canadian coins will slowly begin disappearing from wallets, replaced by Steven Rosati’s portrayal of King Charles III.

The Royal Canadian Mint says Blunt “holds a special place in history” as only the second Canadian artist to design a royal effigy for the country’s coins.

But having her design chosen in 2002 was just one of many remarkable moments in Blunt’s wild and wonderful career.

“Winning the coin competition was very nice. It looked good, of course, on my resume,” Blunt recalled in a recent interview at her home in the Norgate neighbourhood of North Vancouver.

“Even recently, I was invited to go to Shanghai to an international symposium of coin designers from all over the world.”

WATCH | Susanna Blunt’s coin design rolls out in 2003:

Still, there is so much more to Susanna Blunt than a drawing on a coin.

The last six decades have seen Blunt cleaning house for Yoko Ono, painting portraits of Canada’s upper crust, designing an optical illusion room at Vancouver’s Science World and showing her sculptures, well into her golden years, at one of the most prestigious art exhibitions in the world.

After all this time — “you’re not allowed to print my age,” she says — she has no intention of retiring. The prospect of giving up on art is too grim to contemplate.

“It’s your breath of life, it’s your oxygen, and without it, you really are dead. I mean, what do people do? Play board games with their neighbour? Oh, I would rather be dead,” she said.

‘My favourite feeling in life is “Wow!”‘

Blunt’s home is filled with pieces in every stage of completion — collages, prints and sculptures big and small. She works whenever she can find the time and energy, even when she’s lying in bed.

Sculptures from her ongoing Warrior series are scattered through the rooms. These human figures play on mythological and Jungian archetypes like the alchemist, the hero and the mother, and are built from materials including a fencing mask, discarded laboratory pipettes and a bust sculpted from a muold of Blunt’s own breasts.

Her approach is visceral. Great art makes her laugh or shout with joy. Bad art revolts her.

“My favourite feeling in life is ‘Wow!'” Blunt said.

It can take years of tinkering before a piece is finally complete.

“I don’t plan my work,” she explained. “I fool around with material or images, and they speak to me with some sort of electrical vibrations, wavelengths — call it whatever you want. It is physical. It has nothing to do with intellectualism. The brain does not enter the picture.”

One recent digital collage shows a delicate gold bird skeleton cradled within an X-ray of human pelvic bones, all set in front of a field of stars in a deep blue universe. Blunt says an assistant played with the composition and colour on Photoshop while she directed.

“I work with somebody who’s an expert and could change things just the tiniest bit at a time until it was singing,” she said. 

“It’s like, you hear this chord and it rings in your ears like a bell and those vibes go through your body. When my body lights up, I say stop.”

Yoko Ono, globetrotting and a shift to sculpture

Raised in British Columbia, Blunt studied at the Banff School of Fine Arts as a teenager, then spent her formative years at art schools in England.

During her time in London, she cleaned houses to earn money for travel, which is how she ended up working for Yoko Ono, cleaning, preparing lunches and helping with art projects.

She doesn’t remember the job with much fondness.

“I don’t want to really talk about it. I disliked her immensely,” Blunt said. 

Blunt then moved to San Francisco, where she befriended and was inspired by surrealists like Gordon Onslow Ford, whose work still hangs in her home.

Eventually, Blunt returned to Vancouver, where she taught at the University of B.C. and designed the optical illusion room at Science World for its opening.

By then, she’d developed an international reputation for her paintings and murals, and was making a good living as a portraitist. However, she still wasn’t satisfied with her skillset and enrolled at The Art Institute at Capilano University.

“I wanted to make sculptures so badly and I didn’t know how to make anything,” Blunt said.

She recalls trying to set plaster by pouring it into a cardboard box.

“Of course, the water seeped through the box and I had a huge lake of plaster in my studio. I decided I’d better go back to school,” she said.

Today, Blunt is perhaps best known as a portraitist, and she still takes commissions. Among other works, she’s responsible for the official 1995 portrait of the strikingly behatted Gerda Hnatyshyn, wife of former governor general Ray Hnatyshyn, that hangs in Rideau Hall.

But the most exciting moments in Blunt’s career have been more recent. In 2016, one of her sculptures was chosen to appear in the famed summer exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where she’d studied as a young woman.

Her work was chosen again in 2018.

The enthusiastic attention and praise she experienced during those exhibitions has provided her with both validation and motivation.

“It really did change my life forever in terms of my morale and how I regard what I do,” Blunt said.

“I’m going to try to get in again. I’ll have to be pushed around in a wheelchair, but I’m going.”