Captured by the Blunt approach

She has painted aristocrats, musicians, business people, children and pugs.

Pugs are probably the easiest; businessmen are the most difficult.

Unlike many women executives, men are often reluctant to sit for their portraits.

'Sometimes men are afraid of me - this woman who is analysing them,' she said, remembering one man who could not relax in her studio even for an initial photograph.

'So I went to his office, and there he was like God. Everyone bowing and scraping.

'I didn't relate to all that stuff. In fact I made the rules while he was sitting. At first he was outraged, but then he really enjoyed it.

'Many people like sitting for a portrait because it gives them a chance to talk about things that matter to them. It's rather like a therapy.' Gerda Hnatyshyn, Canada's first lady, is her most recent subject. The painting left for Ottawa on the same day that she left for Hong Kong.

'Thank God it's over. I've been a nervous wreck,' she admitted.

'She said she liked the painting . . . then a few days later she called to say she loved it.' Rejections of Blunt's portraits are rare, although one was particularly memorable.

A man had commissioned her to paint his wife. The woman's mother cried when she saw the piece: 'That's my daughter . . . how did you know?' 'Everyone adored the painting, except the husband, who hated it with a passion,' said Blunt.

'I think the husband couldn't bear to see his wife as she really is: self-possessed and strong.' Painting someone you like is one thing: it's harder to paint someone you dislike.

When the person is rude and overbearing, then Blunt has to distance herself from her personal feelings and concentrate on producing a likeness.

'I try to look at the human being behind the manner,' she said generously.

'A horrid person is often someone who has suffered.' A portrait painter cannot present too strong a character herself, she said: 'To some extent you have to blend in with what your clients expect.' So Blunt is no eccentric, she said - it is not good for business - but she admitted she and her husband had firm ambitions to go in that direction in their old age.

'I don't think I'm eccentric, but people sometimes have that re-action,' she said.

One corner of her home is conventional, she said: 'There is a nice conservative sofa, some Chinese vases, silver picture frames, so people are put at their ease.' The trouble is, to get there, you have to squeeze past an enormous African bird sculpture from the Ivory Coast, which is 'very black, and very intimidating and smells of tar'.

The rest of their small house in Vancouver is filled with painted optical illusions.

Doors that do not open, corridors to nowhere, keyholes with no holes, two-dimensions that look like three.

The floors are painted in bright yellow and there are paintings and panels everywhere.

It is a kind of underlying, harmless, wackiness that has been apparent in her non-commissioned works ever since she was a child - and an unconventionality which attracted Yoko Ono to hire her as an assistant in London for six months in 1967. 'Do you know, I can't really remember what we did,' said Blunt, in surprise at the lapses in her own memory. 'Although I seem to remember making strange fruits out of glass.' Ono - who had just met John Lennon - was 'very strong, but very lonely'.

'I felt compassionate towards her,' Blunt said.

'I felt she was having a difficult time.' Blunt's own childhood was not easy. She was born in Harbin - her father worked with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank - and the family was interned during the war.

She and her mother were shipped out of China in 1943 on the last passenger ship to leave Shanghai.

Her father was a prisoner for two more years, and was never the same, mentally or physically, again.

'He was English: very reserved,' she said. 'He could talk about taking the weevils and the rat poo out of the rice before they could eat it in the camp, but he could never talk about the important things.' Susanna Blunt will be in Hong Kong until December 6 and can be contacted through Catherine Maudsley Ltd on 2522-8028

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