Stephen Bird Paintings and Drawings: About the Work

If you wish to enquire about the works, please contact me at sguyonbird[at]gmail.com.

Exhibition notes from the exhibition at Spelman's York, running from March 5th to March 31st 2012.

Marks of invention: 40 paintings by Stephen G. Bird

Drawing is at the very heart of this work. A world of familiar, knowable objects is clearly delineated - a rug by the fire, a bath, teapot, cat, table, chair. These are homely things set in a cottage by the sea in Cornwall or the Hebrides, or set in 1970s London and its Deptford pubs, back rooms, 1950s Lambeth flats, red pillar boxes, Routemaster buses, bicycles, scooters and Morris Minors. The images tell of a life lived through domestic ritual, the sacrament of the everyday - genre painting of a kind.

Yet, other narratives break through these domestic themes. A mythical landscape informs the works, full of signs and symbols. The same characters appear in the paintings over and over again – the mermaid is the most obvious, but also Salome, archangels or winged beings, Jonah, the Leviathan, Cain and Abel. There are references to the early saints and parables, themes from the Old and New Testaments, lending resonance to the mundane.

The challenge with the mermaid, first inspired by an ancient pew-end carving in Zennor, Cornwall, is to go beyond the sentimental veneer of the symbol today. In these paintings she is the spirit of wisdom, closer to the Madonna of late Gothic and Early Renaissance art, except she surfaces in the Thames, on London streets, the northern seas, or in a bath. She is also a symbol of playfulness and the perplexing difference between man and woman.

There is humour in the works – because life is funny and sometimes silly – like the mermaid in the bath. But life can be dark and terrifying and the works also express violence, depicting torturers and the tortured – as with images of the severed head of John the Baptist and Orpheus.

The style is singular and evocative, based on layers of colour, pattern and closely woven composition. On one level the paintings are primitive in nature, held together by line, as line holds together a medieval illumination or a cartoon strip from the 1950s Beano; the body, for example, is often anatomical in nature, broken down and bolted together to make a muscular arabesque. On another level the paintings are complex in their construction and references to art and literature.

Every year Stephen takes an art history trip to Florence and references in the work to Giotto and Uccello, as well as many other medieval and early Renaissance artists, are evident. The visionary nature of the images also shows the influence of William Blake and Samuel Palmer and 20th century British narrative painters such as Stanley Spencer, John Craxton, Cecil Collins and David Jones.

Above all the works express a preoccupation with the mechanics of drawing and painting and the new worlds that can be created simply through putting marks down on paper, board or canvas.