Angus Stirling

BIOGRAPHY

Angus Stirling was born into a deeply artistic family, his eye trained from an early age through contact with the accomplished paintings his mother and her grandfather had created and further honed through absorbing the many works of art by other artists that his forebears collected in abundance and displayed in the family home.

Stirling has never lost the ability of intuitive response which he experienced upon seeing the paintings of those artists he admired in his childhood. Today with distinguished positions at the Arts Council, National Trust and Royal Opera House behind him he has entered a new chapter in his life in which he is able to devote much more of his time to painting. Stirling is graciously insistent that he could not have achieved anything of artistic worth without the tuition he gained upon retirement from the gifted teacher Robin Child at the Lydgate Art Research Centre in Wiltshire. It seems clear that the early lessons given by Child have helped each work Stirling creates today to continue to explore the very act of painting. Each new work bringing forth a new set of compositional parameters and balancing acts sent to try the artist and test his artistic resolve.

The figure and land and cityscapes have been a constant in Stirling's work providing him with an armature to work from but rarely stealing the show over his fascination with abstract composition and an unfettered enjoyment of colour and form.

In many of Stirling's wonderful paintings of architectural facades from Venice the bright midday sun reflects from the surfaces of the buildings achieved by allowing the light, warm tones of the initial ground of each painting to pierce through later mark making. W. M. Turner used similar techniques to imbue oil paintings with the translucence of his watercolours. Indeed there are parallels to be found with Turner's treatment of landscape in a handful of Stirling's paintings most notably a wonderful landscape scene in this exhibition full of warm brown umber, deep blacks and steely greys appearing as a mirage of colours and tones hovering and mingling on the picture plane like vapour.

Stirling often uses colour to communicate the specific mood of a place. The many variations of blue in his startling depiction of the Trevi Fountain in Rome create a velvet backdrop to the sculpted figures in this scene giving the impression that a theatrical stage has been created highlighting the dramatic poses of the foreground figures. It is as if the blue light shines through a stained glass window bathing the whole scene in a rich unreal light.

The figure is a subject which Stirling has returned to many times. The work of the artist Keith Vaughan has been an abiding inspiration to Stirling and can be detected in some of the posing or dancing figures he has painted. There is a strong sense upon viewing Stirling's figure paintings that he has confronted, head on, the beguiling pull of Vaughan's work and in doing so he has opened up new possibilities and found his own way beyond. A recent very large study on paper of overlapping figures drawn from life has a remarkable immediacy and energy and has led to further paintings which can be found in the current exhibition. It is clear that in the angles and positive and negative shapes he draws us to in his figure paintings, Stirling has a deep understanding of the vitality and potential for motion that we associate with the human form.

Memory plays a part in many of Stirling's paintings enabling the artist to draw on his particular response to a place with a subtlety that goes beyond mere topographical description. Memory distils a subject to essential elements and it is here that StirlingÕs process of painting has something akin to musical composition. As classical music can often release in us memories from the patchwork of our accumulated experience; for artist and viewer alike the opportunity arises in these abstracted scenes to allow our imaginations to run free.

Balance is a strong element in the artist's painting and there are parallels here too with musical composition. The weight of marks made and the controlled emphasis of the combined colours and tones all show something of the tightrope the artist walks in each and every picture between the two opposing passions of his alter egos; those of free gestural painting and, in contrast, the chess game of refined abstract composition.

The tension of taming the desire for dynamic energised mark making just enough to successfully achieve the visual equilibrium of a balanced composition can be found in so many of Stirling's paintings be they of Mediterranean cityscapes and gardens, figures in interiors or depictions of the hills and valleys of Britain. The fact that as a viewer we do not actually think of the balance Stirling strives for is quite simply because he manages to achieve it time after time. We are only aware of the part which harmony plays in our experience of a painting or piece of music when we are confronted by disharmony. Instead Stirling deftly enables our eyes to traverse the picture plane and weigh each balanced mark against those which surround it without abruptly halting that process with misplaced visual punctuation.

Henry Garfit, Cornwall, 2010