Stephen West

Influences/ongoing themes

Present themes include ash trees, Yggdrasil, meetings and partys, creatures, dogs, architectural spaces, natural world. These are combined with the artist’s life, contemporary events and an interest in the mythic and historical in personal off-the-cuff figurative works. Experimental drawings and more studied drawings often of architectural or natural spaces with active figures are combined with stone carvings or sculpture in wood, clay or bronze of simplified and abstracted elements. In 2013/2014 West is working on the Ash Grove series, responding to the airborne spores that threaten the european ash forest; meetings or dinner parties where a dog disturbs the proceedings; and the 1914 sculptures of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

Artistic influences vary from so-called 'pre-historic' painting to French Romanesque sculpture, early British and late medaeval sculpture, Italian 14th C. art of Jacopo dell Quercia and Pisano, through Piranese to the modern period of Picasso, Miro, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska, late moderns such as Guston and Dubuffet and the contemporary work of Paladino, Penck, Bazelitz.

Stephen has always used drawing as a primary artform and the mark, whether drawn, painted or made with a chisel is the basic element of all his work. He has always developed this mark or line to be as expressive and significant in the work as it can be while still describing the image. His principal appellation could be 'drawyer'.