IAN STEPHENSON
English Painter
“I am an English painter and do not want to be anything else. I love the tradition of an albion art and really my paintings have more to do with Constable’s snow than Tobey’s white writing. I have always known how I was to make pictures and speculations about the nature of painting stem from the style. The practice of painting is a defined discipline and desirably difficult.
Annealing and concealing colour. All of painting is camouflage, not least of all by means of subject matter whatever the sentiment. It is within the freaked skin of camouflage that the art resides. To be blessed with the contradictory nature of things. If there is no alternative to the way things are, then the picture must be more and more of what it is. Neural and neutral, the greyness scintillates. Overlapping and obliterated. Oblivion. Such is the practice of palimpsestial painting. Alas, it is as dilemmic as remembering to forget.