OLIVIA STANTON | BEHIND THE CURVE
Olivia Stanton has worked at the Chelsea art materials shop Green & Stone for 50 years; as an artist she is represented by Candida Stevens, the Chichester-based gallerist. This two-week show is a collaboration between Green & Stone Gallery and Stevens, and displays work produced by the Hastings-based abstractionist over the last four years.
Olivia Stanton, Track and Trace 3, 2020, Oil on canvas, 41 x 40.5 cm. Copyright The Artist, courtesy Candida Stevens
The last four years being the last four years, it’s been a particularly fruitful period.
Stanton’s abstracts are rooted in British landscape painting, but there’s a hint of Japanese wood block in there too, with her use of black, and her matte fields of colour. She sets up her easel looking up to a raised garden, and once she has seen something to inspire her, she builds the paintings up intuitively, reacting to her first mark with another, and then another, and then another: juxtaposing shape against colour, geometric angle against organic curve.
The artist doesn’t want to ascribe meaning to the paintings through their titles, so she names them from buzzwords and catchphrases from the media she encounters while she is painting them. And so we get: Following the Science, Impasse, Rollout and Track and Trace 3. Taking a look at the many works previewed on Stevens’ website, it appears Stanton had a productive pandemic.
‘One gets the sense that Olivia Stanton sees the world differently to most people’, writes Isabella Joughin, in her rather fine overview of the show. ‘Where one person simply sees the edge of a roof, she sees a pleasing intersection of perpendicular forms. Instead of just a bird sitting on the branch of a tree, she sees the joyful curve of a wing and a ripple of light cast by sun and shadow on the leaves. The interplay of these shapes seep into her subconscious where, removed from their origins, they are free to shift and reshape, so that when it comes to painting they are reborn as dynamic compositions of line, colour and form.’
Candida Stevens will also be showing Stanton’s work at Stand 36 of British Art Fair, alongside pieces by Alice Kettle, Pippa Blake, Irene Lees and Kerry Harding.
Candida Stevens Gallery