DAVID STOREY | MEMORY MAN

David Storey: Where the Sky Meets the Sea, courtesy of The Stratford Gallery

The oil painter David Storey brings forgotten people’s memories to life, and makes them universal.

 He trawls car boot sales and flea markets for old family photo albums, and uses selected images - often of individuals or family groups posing rather awkwardly for a loved-one’s holiday snap - as the starting point of his process. He works these images into miniature portraits, using egg tempera and oil on wood, attempting to ‘unlock the poetry from within’.

 These can perch on his studio shelves for years: the ones that resonate with him the most are worked up into gallery-sized oil paintings. He hardly uses a brush, fashioning his works with his fingers, rags and palette knives. His figures rarely have discernible features – he consciously leaves out details in order to capture the incomplete nature of memory.

 In doing so, he creates an eerie universality: you look at the figure or figures, and think: ‘hey, that could be my grandfather’, or ‘that reminds me of my brother and sister, in the 70s’, or even ‘hey, isn’t that me?’ The pieces are infused with a gentle, timeless melancholy.

 Storey has had an interesting career. Having studied fine art at Middlesex University, in the late seventies he became the creative art director for Chrysalis Records, and a designer for 2-Tone Records, the record label of The Specials, and Madness. He lectured at St Martins College, and became a full-time oil painter 25 years ago, working from his studio in Hove. In 2012 he was shortlisted for the Threadneedle Prize.

 For six years he has been represented by Stratford Gallery in Worcestershire, who are this spring putting on the biggest solo show of his paintings to date, entitled In My Mind. Need a good excuse to make a trip to the Cotswolds? You might just see someone you recognise. The exhibition runs until April 14.