curvethebehind stantonolivia
3 olivia stanton behind the curve 12 Northgate, Chichester West Sussex PO19 1BA +44 (0)1243 528401 +44 (0)7794 info@candidastevens.com416569www.candidastevens.com All works are available for sale on receipt of this catalogue. Please contact the gallery for prices and availability. All works are framed, framed images can be found on our website, some are shown here as examples.
6One gets the sense that Olivia Stanton sees the world differently to most people. Where one person simply sees the edge of a roof, she sees a pleasing intersection of perpendicular forms. Instead of just a bird sitting on the branch of a tree, she sees the joyful curve of a wing and a ripple of light cast by sun and shadow on the leaves. The interplay of these shapes seep into her subconscious where, removed from their origins, they are free to shift and reshape so that when it comes to painting they are reborn as dynamic compositions of line, colour and form.
Having worked for the iconic London art supply shop Green & Stone for almost fifty years, it is Stanton’s deep understanding of colour and technique that sits at the heart of her practice. Working exclusively in oils, she prepares her own canvases with traditional rabbit skin glue. Using this as a clear primer, she then paints ‘directly’ onto the pale, textured surface of the cotton. Over time, she has come to know which paints are vital in her armoury and how to mix them. Black, for example, is never just black. It is black mixed with a little blue or dash of red to achieve the unique tone that the painting demands. Choosing not to varnish her works, there is a vitality and honesty to the paintings that invites the viewer in.
In association with Green & Stone, Candida Stevens Gallery is proud to present ‘Behind the Curve’, a solo show of works encapsulating the last four years of the artist’s practice. There is an uplifting confidence in this body of work reflective of the fact that Stanton has more time than ever to paint. A diverse colour palette, strong geometric shapes, sharp outlines and bold anchors of black come together in a series of works that feel both harmonious and empowered. Working from her home with a raised view to the garden, the artist sits before her canvas and waits for the impulse to make her first mark. There is no plan or predetermined idea of what the final painting should look like, but that is not to say that the process is random. Instead, the positioning of each shape and colour is determined by the last in an unconscious and creative process in which Stanton guides the conversations emerging between the forms. Sometimes they refuse to talk to each other and she is forced to carry on, reworking the shapes again and again until she unearths the spark between them. Not wanting to ascribe meaning through their names, Stanton often chooses the titles of her works based on the repeated phrases being used in the media at the time of making. There is a playfulness to the way she selects these. Track and Trace, 1-3, 2020, for example, dates three works to the pandemic but also invites the viewer to consider the lines within these pieces and follow them around each canvas. In doing so, we are taken on three very different journeys that demonstrate the transportive power of colour and command Stanton has over her palette.
- Gillian Ayres OBE Like Ayres, Stanton produces works that are not asking to be rationalised and understood, despite the glimpses of landscape they often contain. It can be tempting to try to ‘decipher’ the compositions, especially when these links to reality are apparent - a picket fence in the top left of Rollout, 1, 2021, for example, or a red building with black roof in the centre of Following the Science, 2021. There are rewards, however, for those who resist this urge and simply take the time to sink into the paintings and join the artist in enjoying the beauty of looking without looking. If we are able to achieve this, we arrive closer to understanding the essence of her work than any title ever could.
Olivia Stanton (b.1949) was born in Norfolk, England. Interested in art and writing, she secured a job at the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, in her early twenties. Here, she met influential figures such as Anthony Blunt and Sandy Nairne, and was inspired to train as an artist. Stanton trained at Byam Shaw School of Art (now part of Central Saint Martins), London from 1973-77 under the tutelage of Wynn Jones and Bill Jacklin. After almost a decade living in the foothills of the Pyrenees, France, she moved to Hastings, Sussex, in 2000, where she lives with her partner and fellow artist, David Henderson. She first started at Green & Stone as a student in 1973 and has worked with them for almost fifty years.
Essay by Isabella Joughin
“To me, painting is a visual thing, and that’s it. People like to understand and I wish they wouldn’t! I wish they’d just look.”
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Stanton absorbs the world around her, drawing inspiration from her surrounding environment in many forms; the purity of choral singing, for example, and raw quality of Marianne Faithfull’s voice, the directness of Paula Rego’s portraits and emotional charge of Francis Bacon’s work. In each, it is the honesty and directness of expression that excites the artist. She feels a close connection with artists who have been motivated by colour and form, citing British artists Robyn Denny and Gillian Ayres as major influences. Responding to abstract expressionism and reacting against the St Ives School of landscape painting that was dominant at the time, Denny and Ayres were at the forefront of a burgeoning movement towards abstraction in Britain that began in the late 1950s.
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9 Lie of the Land 4, 2009-2022 oil on canvas 132 x 110 cm
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11 Tribute, 2021 oil on canvas 84 x 99 cm
12 Soundings 1, 2018 Oil on canvas 96.5 x 81 cm
13 Soundings 2, 2018 Oil on canvas 96.5 x 81 cm
14 Soundings 3, 2018 Oil on canvas 97 x 82 cm
15 Soundings 4, 2018 Oil on canvas 96.5 x 81 cm
16 Conspiracy, 2021 Oil on canvas 96.5 x 81 cm
17 Rollout, 1, 2021 Oil on canvas 82 x 97 cm
18 Figures of Speech I, 2018 Oil on canvas 81 x 71 cm
19 Figures of Speech 2, 2018-22 Oil on canvas 81 x 71 cm
20 Homage, 2022 Oil on canvas 80 x 70 cm
21 Borderline, 2022 Oil on canvas 70 x 80 cm
22 Who Knows, 2021 Oil on canvas 70 x 80 cm
23 Behind the Curve, 2, 2021 Oil on canvas 80 x 70 cm
24 Impasse, 2019 Oil on canvas 60.5 x 71 cm
25 Following the Science, 2021 Oil on canvas 51 x 61 cm
26 Shift II, 2019 Oil on canvas 55 x 52 cm
27 Shift III, 2019 Oil on canvas 55 x 52 cm
28 Track and Trace 1, 2020 Oil on canvas 39.5 x 38 cm
29 Track and Trace 3, 2020 Oil on canvas 41 x 40.5 cm
30 Small Change, 2021 Oil on canvas 32 x 33 cm
2020 'Soundings Candida Stevens Gallery, Chichester
2006
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2016 Affordable Art Fair, Battersea, London ‘Traces of Places’. Candida Stevens Fine Art, Chichester. ‘Small works’, Baker-Mamanova Gallery, St.Leonards-on-Sea.
2011 ‘Soviet and British works on paper’, Baker-Mamanova Gallery. ‘Drawn to the Line’ , Piers Feetham Gallery, London. ‘New to DACS’, The Kowalsky Gallery at DACS, London ‘Works on Paper’, SoCo, Hastings ‘Drawings’, Arts in Healthcare, Conquest Hospital, Hastings ‘Drawn to the Line’, Piers Feetham Gallery, London ‘All Things Great and Small’, SoCo Members Show, Hastings ‘To the Limit’, London Group/SoCo Artists, Hastings ‘Art on Paper’ Fair, RCA, London
1995 Centre d’Art Azilien, Le Mas d’Azil, France
2005
2005
2014
2018
2006
2022 London Art Fair, Islington 'Proximity' Candida Stevens Gallery ‘Ivon Hitchens and his lasting Influence’ Candida Stevens Gallery London Art Fair, Islington LAPADA, London 2018 ‘Festival 15’ Hastings Art Forum London Art Fair, Islington ‘Good Nature’ Candida Stevens Gallery
2005
Nationality: British Date of Birth: 1949 Art Education: 1973 – 1977. Byam Shaw School of Art, London, Solo Exhibitions
2009
2015 Jonathan Clark Fine Art, London 2014 Chelsea Arts Club, London 2010 Gallery 286, London 2009 Arts in Healthcare, Conquest Hospital,Hastings
1997 Centre d’Art Azilien, Le Mas d’Azil, France
2018
2007 Gallery 286, London 2004 Gallery 286, London 2002 Gallery 286, London 1999 Workhouse Gallery, London
2015
2006
2019
2022
2019
2007
2016
2017
2013 ‘Breakthrough’. Hastings Arts Forum.
1992 Piers Feetham Gallery, London 1989 Piers Feetham Gallery, London 1987 Piers Feetham Gallery, London Selected Mixed Exhibition
2020 'Soundings' Candida Stevens @ Green and Stone Gallery, London 'A Retrospective' Candida Stevens Gallery, Chichester
‘Slow Art’ SoCo, Hastings
The Society of Landscape Painters,’The British Landscape’ Mall Galleries, 2001-13LondonChelsea
1996 Contemporary Art Fair, Islington, London
Murals (assistant to Lincoln Seligman) 1985-1990:
2000 Workhouse Gallery, London
1998 ‘Artshow 98’,Verteillac, Dordogne, France
322005
1989 Pastel Society, Mall Galleries, London
1978 Society of Women Artists, London
2002 Affordable Art Fair, London
‘Inside the Nazi Ring’ by Henry Denham, published by John Murray, 1984.
La Manga Club, Spain Studley Royal, Yorkshire London (private and corporate)
Art Society,London.
2005 Royal Society of British Artists, Mall Galleries, London
Netherland Plaza Hotel, Cincinatti, Ohio, USA
1978 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London
Contributed mounts to ‘Displaying Pictures’, Clifton-Mogg/Feetham, published by Mitchell Beasley, 1988.
ContributedIllustrations;mounts
1991 Chelsea Arts Club Centenary Exhibition, Smiths Gallery, London
1996 Piers Feetham Gallery, London
2004 ‘Drawn to The Line’, Piers Feetham Gallery, London
1985 Green and Stone, London 1980 Cale Art, London
1978 Royal Society of British Artists, Mall Galleries, London
1995 Galerie Arcadia, Saint-Lizier, France
1986 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London
1994 Exposition d’Artistes Regionaux, Mirepoix, France
1996 Bartley Drey Gallery, London
2004 ‘Paint!’ -12 South Coast Artists, Hastings
1998 Piers Feetham Gallery, London
1978 Business Art Galleries, London Book
1991 Collyer Bristow, London 1990 Edith Grove Gallery, London
2004 ‘On the Wall’, Olympia, London
1990 Art Contact, London.
1992 Collyer Bristow, London 1991 Chelsea Arts Society, London
to ‘The Art of Framing’ by Piers & Coroline Feetham published by Ryland Peters & Small 1997.
2001
33 Published in September 2022 by Candida Stevens Gallery on the occasion of an exhibition featuring the work of Olivia Stanton Catalogue © Candida Stevens Gallery Text © Issy PhotographyJoughin©Dan Stevens All rights reserved
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