Stewart Geddes

Stewart Geddes RWA

DREAM VISIONS: Alfred Stockham and his Circle

Saturday 7 November 2015 – Sunday 28 February 2016

Stewart Geddes studied at Bristol Polytechnic under Alfred Stockham before going on to the RCA. He is currently Vice-Chair of the Trust Board to the RWA, Associate Lecturer at Plymouth University and the Arts University Bournemouth, and External Examiner to the MFA in Fine Art at Wimbledon College of Art. Until 2010 he was Head of Painting at Cardiff School of Art and Design.

Stewart Geddes’ work is in numerous public collections and he has shown widely in the UK and abroad. This is his first show at Sladers Yard.

His paintings are shown below. Please click on an image to see it and the other images expanded with full captions. Phone 01308 459511, email gallery@sladersyard.co.uk or reply to this page to enquire about Stewart Geddes’ work.

Swingate 35 x 46cm

Minto 30 x 39cm

Relebbus 23 x 30cm

Finchcocks 23 x 30cm

Sparnon 19 x 22cm

Raftra 30 x 23cm

Chandos 46 x 60cm

Stewart Geddes’ comments on the making of his work:

I’m attracted to the way abstract painting focuses attention on the formal elements – colour relation, surface, edge, transition (from one form to the next), transparency, opacity, the tension of contrasts etc.

However, my painting is not an autonomous form of abstraction.

I perceive it as having a cyclical relation to the world beyond the studio; that is, things in my surroundings engender ideas toward painting, and in turn, the work’s character alerts me to things in the world. And in keeping with the Picasso tactic of ‘finding’ and not ‘seeking’, I most usually discover things that might trigger work when on a walk or driving the car.

A motif that has been central to the work for a while now is the notion of the ‘Modern Ruin’ – ruins that were only recently the last word in newness. I’m attracted to how such buildings, having been relieved of their daily function, are liberated to hold new meanings. Consequently they have become prompts for work, which in turn has led me to tear and scrape at the painted surface.

I began thinking about scraping and tearing when looking at Matisse. In certain paintings, particularly during the 1910s, he used the tip of a palette knife to scrape away areas of the most recently painted layer, in order to partially erase a form. However, this process of subtraction is not a precursor to further additions of paint, instead, the excavation is allowed to remain, sparkling and animating the painted surface. And so we oscillate between a ghostly form and startling under-surfaces

As can be perceived from the palimpsest surface, each of my paintings has gone through numerous permutations before resolution is attained. I ‘find’ resolution through a process of negotiation: between the proposition for each painting, and the materials and processes by which they are constructed.