5 minutes with Stephen Todd
If we spent 5 minutes in your studio on a normal working day, what would we see, hear or experience?
The sound of clattering palettes and perhaps the scratch of nib on paper accompanies the boiling of a kettle. There is hopefully a contemplative silence inside the studio, but outside is the hum of the city centre interjected with the occasional siren of the fire station next door. I often listen to a play or book reading whilst working; there's something about the spoken word that helps me delve into my work, and my paintings are often infused with words and phrases themselves: marks to represent streams of consciousness.
What's the best advice you've received, or the best you've offered?
The best advice I've received was “Don’t be afraid of destroying something in a painting or drawing." This was told me by the late John Epstein who inspired me through charcoal life drawing. It was a lesson in mark making, about not trying to preserve and stay with what you know, but to have courage to go on to places you've not yet encountered. I would pass on that advice, but explain it as seeing each painting and drawing as an experiment, trying things out. It’s all in the energy of the moment. Consider it a strength to not know where something is going to end up.
Could you pick one of your works and tell us something about it?
Traffickers (Humber Estuary) (pictured) was, as with most of my work, painted in the studio, but it started with walking, sketching and photographing amidst the depicted landscape. The painting starts at the approach to the Estuary and pier at Spurn Head where there is a lifeboat station. I heard a report on the radio about some asylum seekers being found in Hull docks, a very small part of the massive shift of people across Europe from the Middle East and Africa, often out of sight. But this region was also a conduit for mass migration in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when over 2.2 million people travelled from Scandinavia and the Baltic through the Humber, on tickets that included the train journey from Hull to Liverpool for emigration to USA, Canada and beyond. All these thoughts materialised during the painting process and gave me the title Traffickers.
Read Stephen Todd's full interview
More works by Masters artists:
Emily above the Fireplace by Vikram Kushwah
Delicate by John Clark
Goodbye Sweetheart by Iain Andrews
The Little Waterfall by Sophie Baker
Garden #55 by Carlos San Millan
Untitled (Prayer) by Ed Saye
Tisshoes by Keren Luchtenstein
Out of Your Depth (London Paintings - River Thames) by Stephen Todd
