Jasper Stinchcombe's Art

Addendum - Art Done in South Africa

(August 2013 to Februrary 2014)

Jasper Stinchcombe

I left to teach art at the Lady Grey Arts Academy in South Africa in August 2013 after completing my A2 levels and will return in late August 2014. I expected to paint lions and landscapes when in South Africa, and make batiks and braids. I have done some, well landscapes at least, and hope to do more. But I am a teenager abroad with other teenagers, living and working in a remote Arts Academy with other artists, and receiving letters and news clippings from home far away – so my immediate inspirations are rather different than anticipated, as reflected in most of the work I have done in my first 6 months.

Landscape Sketches 1 and 2 – A5

Christopher Hitchens

This was the first painting I did in South Africa. As noted above, I want during my year in South Africa, to try to my hand at landscape art. But I am, predominantly, a portrait painter, and since I am here to teach as well as to learn, I wanted to start with something I felt comfortable with to help me settle into my new country. I chose Hitchens because my fondest sources to begin with were magazine and newspaper cuttings – the props of familiarity - sent to me from home. Besides that, he has always been an inspiration – his polemics, his wit, his writing, and his courage in life and before death

Acrylic Painting – Christopher Hitchens

Ronnie Wood

I felt compelled to do a picture of Ronnie Wood because I had never done him before and it seemed like the right time to do him justice, now that I was based in an Arts Academy. I sourced the image from a magazine sent by my parents on how his art had saved him from alcohol abuse – my family know I love collecting clippings of artists especially when it looks into their lives and what inspired them. I do not see the painting as an attempt to copy a photo; to me it is a study into something which intrigues me personally and which (almost) everyone can identify with - a picture of a well-known, respected and appreciated person in English culture and music. I incorporated some of Wood’s own paintings in the background.

Acrylic Painting – Ronnie wood

Freud at the Back my Mind

One day I was requested by the Art Department to paint a piece during an exhibition of the students’ work. I did not really have anything in mind or planned, so I just started painting - using whatever colours I thought looked nice at the time. As I painted with white on a reddish/dark background, the shape and form of an artist began to appear, which to me looked like Freud, so that is where my brush strokes took me. Interestingly though, most people who watched me while I worked, got the impression that I was doing a self-portrait. The view of Viljoen (the head of the Art Department at the Academy) was that while I was painting the piece, I was aware of myself as I painted it, so I unknowingly bled some of my own features into the painting.

Acrylic Painting – Freud at the Back of My Mind

Bacon and Dyer

My parents sent me a book on Bacon and I found a photograph of him beside his boyfriend George Dyer, torn at one end and covered with splashes of paint. The image depicted the primary features found in Bacon’s work: chaos, violent energy, self-destruction. It was also a clever and symbolic depiction of the relationship of George and Francis; it wasn’t a completely balanced, it was a little disorientated (they were both alcoholics); and it was fragile (George died of an overdose) whilst confident.

Acrylic Painting – Bacon and Dyer

Painters’ Series

I painted a series of paintings of painters at work, all on cardboard such can be the paucity of materials in South Africa. Although they are clearly influenced by Freud and Bacon, I was thinking of the Impressionists when I created them and they are in pastels for this reason. In the first piece the colours, applied in vertical lines, are blue, white and light green, relaxing and mellow. In the next I used the same colours, but in swirls and with yellow added, to express more energy. In the third, also in swirls, I used harder, stronger strikes, and red too, showing more energy and power. It would be more accurate to say this series is expressionist, but it was the Impressionists which drove me on.

Pastels on Cardboard – Artists’ Series 1-3

A Rembrandt Freud

It was nearing Christmas during my stay in Lady Grey and I wanted to do a painting for some friends I had made during my stay. I started a study of a self-portrait by Lucian Freud. While I was working on the piece, also on cardboard, I got the impression of Rembrandt’s style of impasto painting (most likely because Freud was influenced by the Dutch artist himself). I could see something in the texture used in the skin and structure of the Freud painting I was working from, including the shadow on one side of the face, which Rembrandt used in numerous paintings to heighten features in his portraits, making them more distinct and the overall piece more dramatic.

Acrylic on Cardboard – A Rembrandt Freud

Greyscale

I have already explained the need to paint on cardboard. That was not the worst of it. During the Christmas holiday, I painted so many pictures in my spare time that I ran out of paints and all I had left was black acrylic. Yet I still felt the great desire to paint. I did not even have white paint, which meant to get new tones I could only dilute my paint and see how far I could take it. Below is ‘Freud Bacon’, two of my greatest inspirations and influences, reduced to (or revealed by?) black acrylic and brown cardboard.

Greyscale on Cardboard – Freud Bacon

I had been forced to the same expedient of ‘greyscale’ on my very first day in the Lady Arts Academy. They were doing a dram production which involved prop posters with the faces of eminent figures and they did not have time to create any stencil images for them. They asked me to do as many paintings as I could with the minimal materials they had at the time. Below are just two of them. (I found it funny that, because of a lack of time, they asked me to paint them pictures rather than use stencils.)

Greyscale on Paper – Athol Fugard and Johan Heyns

Sketches and Pictures of Girls and Gorg

While I travelled down the Garden Route for New Year, I did a bit of gallivanting with my fellow travellers, making the acquaintance of girls at various back packers. On the 1^st January, I began to doodle in a small A5 sketch book I carried with me.

Sketch 1 – A5 - Backpacking on Garden Route

Sketches 2 and 3 (‘Woman as Cello’) 4 – A5 – Backpacking on Garden Route

‘Woman as Cello’, above right, was inspired by Jurgen Gorg. I adore his blending of colours, the delicate strokes of pencil and brush, his subject matters - the human form, instruments, dancing and the interaction between man and woman. This drove me to take the small sketches I had done and transform them into larger Gorg-inspired pictures. I used oil pastels.