Stephen Read
Denmark Place Studios will be open from midday to 6PM. For a Covid-safe experience, please email stephenefread@gmail.com to book your studio visit.
Artist Bio
Stephen Read paints the familiar landscape overlaid with an implied narrative that is ambiguous, possibly disconcerting but clearly ‘of our time’.
Visit Website ⟶
Stephen Read studied at St Martin’s and then Wimbledon School of Art before moving to the US, where he completed an MA at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
Following RISD he was awarded a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Centre in Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, an artist colony accepting both visual artists and writers. He has exhibited variously in the Threadneedle Prize, Lynn Painter-Stainer Prize, Westmoreland Landscape Prize and has work in the The Schorr Collection and various private collections in UK and USA.
Stephen is interested in the increasing industrialisation of our countryside and by portraying the familiar landscape but then overlaying an implied narrative that is ambiguous and possibly disconcerting, but is clearly ‘of our time’; ‘I wish to convey a sense of the impact humans are having on our environment’.
In the current series of paintings I am interested in the waterlogged fields of the agricultural landscape, following periods of exceptional and unusual rainfall, as reminiscent of the grainy images of WWI battlefields of northern France and therefore a metaphor for mankind’s impending battle with climate uncertainty. I want to convey the aspects of our ‘green and pleasant’ land with a slight look of the dystopian, and a nod to Paul Nash and other WWI artists. The landscape of the Anthropocene; the landscape ‘of our time’. I work from photographs of flooded fields in Suffolk with deep tracks in the earth by industrial size farm vehicles, creating dramatic flooded vistas highlighting just how fragile our world is.’
Takes Commissions
Artists CV
2021 Jackson’s Painting Prize, (Long List)
2019 The Westmorland Landscape Prize - Rheged Gallery, Penrith
2016 Threadneedle Prize Exhibition - Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy
Threadneedle Prize - Mall Galleries, London
2013 Threadneedle Prize - Mall Galleries, London
2012 Lynn Painter-Stainer Prize - Mall Galleries, London,
2010 Lynn Painter-Stainer Prize - Painters Hall, London
2009 Lynn Painter-Stainer Prize - Painters Hall, London,
Threadneedle Prize - Mall Galleries, London
