Stephen Saunders

I sold my first painting (actually it was a pen and ink drawing) when I was fifteen, from my O level show at school, but nobody recommended that I should to look at making a living that way.

I am now sixty eight, and self taught largely, having done everything other than draw or paint, five times around the world in the interim. A much more detailed bio can be found in The Amputated Trucker, - More Life Than I Thought Possible, a life story I wrote around the time of covid, and that rather gives away my other identity; I’m an amputated truck driver, (and for a few years I was a one legged hot air balloon pilot too). I am also a writer of rhyming stories, and if my style were to be compared it would at least aspire to be like Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and Hilaire Belloc.

I was born and brought up in Elsted, near Midhurst in West Sussex, and despite an adult life of moving, including three years as an ‘Outback Trucker’ in the north of Western Australia, I find myself living back in Midhurst again, with my wife and son, also artists. I love drawing faces, be they animal or human, but since I prefer beauty, I don’t usually draw misery or ugliness.

I do enjoy scenes of dereliction, but I see beauty in them, and branching out I ...

Christ's Hospital, Horsham, West Sussex, England, to A level

1972 Christ's Hospital
April 2025 Elsted UK, Solo show
August 2025 Freedom Through Expressions, Alton UK
October - November 2025, Phoenix Arts Centre, Bordon UK