Contact, CV and Texts

CV, Catalogue note, Artist Statement and Contact details

CV

Cambridge University, Philosophy 

Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts London  

Work exhibited:

The Charleston Trust "Quentin Follies",   2006

Wimbledon Group Exhibition, "Feeding a little life", 2008 

Group Show at Deutche Postbank, Queen Street, London,   2008

Group Show, Cobden Club, Notting Hill,  London    June   2010

Group Show, HangArt 7, Salzburg, Austria    October 2010

http://www.hangar-7.com/en/art/hangart-7-edition-16-england

The Other Art Fair, Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, London  November 2011

          http://www.theotherartfair.com/projects/david-stockley/

Group Show, "The Chaos of Memories", Tabernacle Gallery, January 2012

Group Show, Debut Contemporary Gallery, London March 2012

Shortlisted National Open Art Competition September 2012

The Other Art Fair, London  April 2013

Shortlisted Lynn Painter Stainers Painting Prize 2014

The Other Art Fair London April 2014

Group  Show "Individuals and Time" , Tabernacle Gallery, June 2015

Group Show "BEAT - Borough of Ealing Art Trail" September 2016 

Group Show Tabernacle Gallery London  April 2017

Solo Show Galerie aux Quatre Vents  Luberon France July 2017

Group show Galleri 15 Molinsgatan Gothenburg   December 2017

Group show Galerie aux Quatre Vents Luberon France August 2018

Solo show “Interiors” Tabernacle Gallery November 2023

Work in the collections of  Landmark PLC, Dietrich Mateschitz

INTERIORS

I wrote the following commentary for the Exhibition “Interiors” that took place at the Tabernacle Gallery in November 2023:

I have been asked: how is it you paint the pictures that you do? So I have written this commentary to try to give some clues as to how the paintings in this exhibition came about.  

Around twenty years ago, after many years of dabbling with paints and brushes during holidays, I picked up the threads of the art practice of my teenage years. The City Lit and Heatherley School of Art were the springboards. But I only began to find my way properly during my Foundation Course at City Lit in 2005. It was during the first half of this that Simon English, our tutor in drawing, suggested I look at the work of Eric Fischl, a contemporary American figurative painter. It was about the alienation of much US suburban life. I knew that figurative painting was only recently coming out of a period of being the Cinderella of the contemporary art world. And here was a man whose work not only struck a chord with me but also was successfully making a name for himself.

English also introduced me to the work of Michael Borremans, a Belgian, whose surreal take on our world I was strongly drawn to. This awakened an interest in painting people and exploring their states of mind. Not long before this, my career had involved considerable international travel and all that goes with that (airports, trains, hotels, restaurants). There was something about the ambivalence of feelings that went with all that which I could not let go. The moments of enforced solitude that spawned simultaneous feelings of liberation and alienation, of euphoria and unease. I wanted to see how I might depict these moments - and communicate the ambiguities inherent in them. 

After I moved on to Wimbledon College of Art more opportunities to develop these themes presented themselves. My tutor Sean Ashley introduced me to the idea of interstitial space, a nowhere place in between one world and another. This led me to Marc Auge and his book on “Non-Places”. He was referring to the “non-places” of today's consumerism, shopping malls, airports and so on. But I connected his words with non-places, even wastelands, encountered before the arrival of hyper consumerism. I was also interested in railway dining cars and the world of street side cafes.  

Borremans’s surrealism triggered ideas about life's absurdities, and the randomness of events. I had been struck for some time by how, perhaps paradoxically, the most important choices in most of our lives so often pivot on completely accidental circumstances. I'm thinking, for example, of the chance factors that lead to our meeting a person who turns out to be a life long partner, of the way in which so many of us stumble across our first employers, and the accidents of time and space which lead to us to meet those who eventually become closest friends. I wondered how all these ideas might play into my work. So I decided to paint pictures in which I would juxtapose images of people who had never been together in reality and leave it to the viewer to consider how they might or might not connect with each other. I located them in public though often interior spaces. This involved a quest for “found images” (mostly but not exclusively on the Internet), and the discovery that, for no apparent reason, some images out there were magnets to my attention whilst so many others left me cold. This process proved to be an extraordinary stimulus and provided me with the drive any painter needs to get paint brushes working on canvases. 

Unexpectedly the context of the images gradually revealed itself to be relevant. My first experiment happened to take advantage of a found image from the ‘40s, a railway dining car. But subsequently, for a while, I moved to using images I had myself taken and in locations that were absolutely contemporary, in particular the newly built interior of St Pancras station for example. An accident of painting (the unplanned for cracking up of some acrylic paint on an oily white primed canvas surface), produced a result that reminded me of the surface you might find under foot at a ruin. It was as though the building had been prematurely ravaged by time. As it happened, this also gave a formal advantage for the work, giving the picture a certain weight that would otherwise have been missing. It was one of those cases where an accident can take a painter in useful but unexpected directions! 

From the moment Simon English gave me the helpful pointer that he did, I realised that the subject matter I focused on had been of interest to many painters.  To name a few: Manet: “Plum brandy” , Degas: “Dans un cafe" (“Absinthe”), Hopper “Automat”, Vermeer “Girl reading a letter”, Hammershoi ”Interior” and much more recently Karen Mamma Anderssen “Travelling in the family”. My quest for subject matter has also been inspired by a number of street photographers, not least Robert Doisneau, René Jacques, Bert Hardy, Willy Ronis, Eduard Boubat - among many others. 

The process I use when painting was confirmed while I was at Wimbledon. It was suggested I study Gerhardt Richter, a German painter. His early work explored possibilities of abstract expressionism but after a number of years, he reached a creative dead end - he felt that his artistic life had hit the buffers. It was the act of browsing at an antique shop that helped him break this. He came across some black and white photos, largely of World War II subjects, and it suddenly occurred to him that he could paint these postcards: but, he reports in his memoir, in his mind he was not going to focus on the content of the postcards but treat the postcard as an object in its own right and paint it as a thing. This idea was extremely liberating for him. The idea immediately intrigued me and it gave a whole new lease of life to my practice as well. I worked with black and white found images. He painted the greyscale of the postcards in black and white. Though my work began being quite monochromatic, I gradually injected more and more colour, which was not in the original source material. I found that Luc Tuymans, a Belgian painter, used a similar process to Richter, as did Adrian Ghenie, a Romanian. Neo Rauch, a German painter, gave free rein to his palette to set a mood for his paintings. He also employed a painting language that set the world he projected in what seems to be a mediaeval time. If I have been drawn to locate many of my paintings in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s, it may be about a sense of emotional privacy that I feel dominated that time.  Richard Diebenkorn, a Californian painter, began as an Abstract Expressionist, but in mid career moved to figurative work. His colour sense has informed a number of my works. 

Recent commentaries of Vermeer's work, triggered by the Rijks Museum show, have highlighted how the interiors he paints, reflect, and are a metaphor for, the interior of the minds of the people in them. And in this way, it is proposed that his pictures can be seen as introspective works. This idea has made an impression on me. My response has been to give this show the title “Interiors”. 

I understand the work of Richter, Rauch, Hammershoi and Andersson as evoking a silent world, a world where the figures project a consciousness of their own solitude. Edward Hopper, discussing commentaries of his work, is known to have remarked that “the loneliness thing has been overdone”. We can guess that this was a way of saying that it was solitude, not loneliness, that interested him. Yet he knew how close that was to loneliness. Rebecca Seal, an author, wrote a month ago in the Guardian about “the relationship between solitude and loneliness, between the yearning to be alone and our deep desire not to feel isolated” and captures in this sentence the tension that exists between these two states of consciousness. Solitude can lift the mind to extraordinary heights. As Picasso put it: “Without great solitude, no serious work can be done”. But loneliness can erode the essence of a person. The American novelist, May Sarton expressed it succinctly: ”loneliness is the poverty of self, solitude is the richness of self”. Perhaps part of what my paintings are about is an examination of that dynamic. 

  October 2023 

Commentary in Catalogue for "HangArt 7" exhibition 2010 on David Stockley's paintings: 

If it were not for the St Pancras in brackets next to the title, Untitled, we would ask ourselves where we had seen or experienced this inhospitable place ourselves. But St Pancras explains that there is obviously an occasion or a reference that has to do with the recently refurbished London international train terminus. But the spaces that Stockley creates resemble numerous versions of these "un-places" or "non-places" as the French anthropologist Marc Augé calls them, and he provides an important reference point for the artist.

In 2006 in the online magazine Telepolis, Jörg Auf dem Hövel, who also refers to Augé and to the somewhat earlier Georg Simmel, uses the example of the airport to describe these "non-places", where one cannot and does not want to linger and which have created "an antiseptic culture of monotony" - only constructed in order to be left again. And further: "Even if the shell plays with futuristic forms, the content is always the same: check-in counter, fast-food and perfumery chains, dull boarding zones with rows of seats. That is supposed to be like that, the ideal airport is organised around consistent guidance systems and unchanging offers, because everything is intended to fulfil the unchanging expectation of the visitor: I want to get out of here. Anything of more significance there is simply dysfunctional. Everyone is always on the way to a place that is more important than the present one. Airports are places of transit and to wait is to lose."

A further characteristic of this public space is the disappearance of the individual, the lack of confrontation and communication with others. David Stockley takes us to these places: to departure lounges, to buses, to nameless public squares and to railway station halls. The last of these, the pictures from this year, 2010, radiate an almost destructive atmosphere: people stand in vast, apparently still functional, usable spaces in which, however, the ground is covered with rubble and gravel. The few people who are staying here are not talking to one another, are not facing each other; each is looking in a different direction. Here and there powerful colours stand out in predominantly brown, grey and blue tones: above all green - the green of a pullover, a plant or a dress. Green as a last rebellion of nature and its light (in some flashing white places). Even if the colour palette is broader here and there, the predominant mood is of exhaustion, forlornness and loneliness.

David Stockley knows all these places of waiting, bridging and moving on very well. Since his early childhood he has been much travelled. His professional activity, which demanded being frequently on the move, has inscribed these experiences more deeply in his body and soul. Looking at the pictures, a great song, one I prefer in the cover version by Gary Jules rather than the 1982 original by Tears for Fears, suddenly comes to mind. Among other things it says: "All around me are familiar faces / Worn out places, worn out faces / Bright and early for their daily races/ Going nowhere, going nowhere." One could perhaps also call this series of pictures after this song: Mad World.

 Artist Statement

Painting people can be quite an obsession. It affects me in that way. The individual in a public place is a theme that has been extensively explored in art. I think of Degas's "Au Café (l'Absinthe)" and Manet's "La Prune", Hopper's "Automat". Contemporary artists who are relevant to me in this way are Karin Mamma Anderssen, Michael Borremans and Hannah Starkey.  For me works by these artists can evoke their subject's awareness of the very fact of solitude, perhaps loneliness as well.... but maybe that's not the point (Hopper once said "the loneliness thing is overdone". And it is not the point in my practice. I am interested in how the fact of solitude can intersect with the awareness of how the events that can most affect the texture of our lives are accidental, random, have no assignable meaningful cause. I am thinking of, for example, the accident of whom we were born to, the first meeting with the person who becomes our partner, indeed the first meeting with those who become our closest friends.  These ideas have informed the process of my practice.

So I am interested by paintings that deny apparent narratives to and whose process of construction captures the reality of chance.

Following this people in my paintings are often put together who were never together - people look away from each other when once they looked at each other. And places are explored where the mind sometimes finds itself in isolation: the classroom, the train, the platform, the cafe: the "Non places" that Marc Augé refers to in his book of that title.

About my process: as a result of the ideas above, my paintings take their starting points from images I have found or taken myself. They form the basis of drawings which explore what those images are about.

The drawings can be used as moving parts, jostling with each other for a place in the composition. I work with them as one might work with pieces of a collage. The images are often greyscale - the drawing monochrome. There is an adventure in injecting them with colour. And an excitement about how light may touch that colour. And the magic of how the colours will speak to each other. Images can be inverted, drawings transposed. What was one way, is now another. I work on three or four paintings at a time. Perhaps acrylic at the beginning, then oils - and pastels to test to test new colour ideas, glazes and scumbles can follow. Weeks pass between the start and the finish.

Many of my paintings have been sold and are in private collections in the UK, France, Austria and the USA. One of the paintings from my Degree show was selected by Landmark PLC (the sponsor of the show) to be part of its corporate collection. Seven works were chosen to be part of "The Secret of England's Greatness" exhibition in Salzburg The patron of this show was Dieter Mateschitz and four of those works now form part of his collection.

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