STEPHEN ARMSTRONG

Artists Statement

I am a Melbourne based painter with over 40 years exhibiting history. I work mainly in oils as well as doing a lot of drawings in ink, pastel and gouache. I divide my time between working in the studio and going out on location.

My subject matter comes from close to home. Local landscapes, family faces and things around the house are the sorts of things I like to paint.

The Alphington Paper Mills have been an ongoing motif for some time now.  I must have done over 200 paintings and drawings of them by now.  It’s a challenge to capture this fast changing industrial landscape.  I use a vigorous, expressionistic painting technique that I hope reflects what is happening to the site.

I love painting. It is my way of understanding the world around me. Everywhere I look I see a face or a landscape that demands to be caught on canvas.

I do lots of drawings with ink, pencil and charcoal to know a subject, but it is oil paint that really excites me. There is nothing like the smell and feel of oils, they have a tactile, physical quality. Each brushstroke is like trying to catch hold of time, to pin it down before it slips away.

How I compose a picture is very important to me. I swing between a Classical and Romantic sense of pictorial composition. The Classical is all verticals and horizontals, echoing the edges of the canvas. This way of composing can be seen in paintings by Piero della Francesca, Vermeer or Mondrian and give the work a sense of order and stability and is reassuring. When I have used this device too much, I like to go to its opposite – the dynamic, spiralling composition used in the Baroque or Romantic tradition. Rubens, Delacroix or Jackson Pollock would be good examples of this tradition. These paintings are more restless; the image almost explodes out of the canvas.

Much of my time is spent looking through art books. I like to copy the old masters, trying to work out some of their compositional devices. My tastes are eclectic and I relate to artists from many different cultures and periods, but I just keep coming back to Cezanne and Van Gogh. In my opinion, they realised a perfect balance between an inner and outer vision. They looked out at their world, processed their vision, and created paintings that reflected their temperaments. This is what I would like to achieve.

Like the Post-Impressionists, I like working within the traditional genres – the figure, still life and landscape, with landscape being the most prevalent. For the last 20 years I have mainly painted on site or plein air. I find working in front of the motif is more exciting and surprising than working from drawings and photographs in the studio. I paint quickly, responding to my mood and the atmosphere of the scene in front of me, trying to capture my reactions to a specific place at a specific time. Most of my paintings are finished in one session and rarely take more than a couple of hours.

Much of my time is spent looking through art books. I like to copy the old masters, trying to work out some of their compositional devices. My tastes are eclectic and I relate to artists from many different cultures and periods, but I just keep coming back to Cezanne and Van Gogh. In my opinion, they realised a perfect balance between an inner and outer vision. They looked out at their world, processed their vision, and created paintings that reflected their temperaments. This is what I would like to achieve.

Like the Post-Impressionists, I like working within the traditional genres – the figure, still life and landscape, with landscape being the most prevalent. For the last 20 years I have mainly painted on site or plein air. I find working in front of the motif is more exciting and surprising than working from drawings and photographs in the studio. I paint quickly, responding to my mood and the atmosphere of the scene in front of me, trying to capture my reactions to a specific place at a specific time.

If you are interested in purchasing some of Stephens art please contact us at ACC.