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Slate

£45 each

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or call Tadd Hartland on 07545 648918

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Art Statement: Alan Steeves-Booker

My paintings use free-form methods to simulate the effect produced by someone rearranging the pieces of several puzzles, or rapidly flicking the pages of an illustrated book. I am interested in complexity and the way in which our immediate visual experience is overlaid by projected memories and arbitrary thoughts. I have exhibited work at the Flat One Gallery in Cambridge, at the Connoisseur Gallery and the RIBA Architectural Art Show in London, and at the Stroud House Gallery in Gloucestershire. I contributed work to the Amnesty International fundraising event for the Israeli dissident Mordechai Vanunu, and also to the Museum in the Park, Stroud. Recent private commissions have used themes based upon individual life stories, with historical, political, and fictional commentaries. I use acrylic paint, children’s colour, industrial paint, silicone, acid, and digital graphics.

Background. The pastoral qualities of the Berkshire village in which I was born were soon to be engulfed by a large American airbase. My father was an engineer and also a professional photographer who had documented rural life since 1914. He was the official photographer for the engineering company where he worked, and his record of wartime production, juxtaposed with that of the idiosyncratic life of the community, produced a poignant portrait of a society undergoing dramatic and permanent change. At school I studied the art of Chagall, Klee, and Dadaism, which offered new ways in which to perceive the contradictions of the world.

In 1958 l became a student at the architectural school in Oxford, where I joined a progressive movement which challenged what we considered to be outmoded and elitist teaching methods, and the dehumanising effects of modernist architecture. I became interested in New Wave cinema, and formed a free-style jazz group which participated in theatrical collaborations, influenced by the dramatist Bertholt Brecht. In addition to abstract work and tachism, I painted my childhood landscape, full of elm trees and poor people scavenging on military rubbish dumps.

Upon qualifying as an architect I moved to London and designed hospitals, theatres and cinemas. For a brief and disenchanted time I worked on the design of a large marina, which, when completed, succeeded in compromising the unique qualities of a south-coast resort. As a counterbalance to the increasingly commercialised practice of architecture I occasionally worked at the Architectural Association, which had an international reputation as a school free from academic dogma and bureaucratic interference, where architecture, art, ecology and politics co-existed creatively.

In 1974 | was offered a post at the School of Landscape Architecture in Cheltenham, to teach art and graphics. I introduced a ‘ten-second’ sketching technique, as a replacement for traditional and laboured drawing processes, and I also taught landscape design theory, which I incorporated into experimental studio projects, using large-scale modelling and video.

My current work draws upon these background experiences, and aims to transcend them by using layers of intense colour to distract and involve the viewer, and to open different perspectives on reality.

Deborah Stevens is a Somerset based Bronze and Ceramic sculptor, who creates
figurative and abstract forms.

She came into the Art world later in life, just after having her third child, where she went to the
University Centre Somerset, so that she could combine parenting with her realised passion.

To begin with Deborah studied Ceramics and Sculpture and when she realised that Sculpture was where
her future wanted to take her she went on to do her degree in Fine Art.

Deborah has always been fascinated by people so it seemed natural to make human forms that have a
tactile, sensual quality and shape that corresponds with so much that she sees in nature too. Her purpose has always been to present not just the outer form, but the essence of things, to generate an emotional response and fire up people’s imaginations.

Some of her inspiration has been drawn from the enigmatic stone figures of Easter Island as well as
well-known artists like Hepworth and Moore.

When she is not creating something from clay, Deborah works in the Healing world where she offers
Reiki, Meditations and Intuitive Therapy. Spirituality has been very much channelled into her practise.
Sometimes her sculptures emerge directly through her, without any preliminary drawings and with
great intensity, where clay is the perfect medium to work and re-work initially. Then many of her pieces
take on new meaning through being cast in Bronze, a timeless and magnificent medium, which feels a
natural progression to portray her sensual and tactile beings!

Her aim is to combine her therapy/sculptural work and create meaningful pieces that hold therapeutic
value and invite questions on our own mortality and spiritual connection to Mother Earth.

A lovely friend of mine said to me last summer ”I can sense the peace and soulfulness you bring to
your art…it is an expression of you, of life, and the beauty of the formless within form….”