Stephen Whatcott

The bold structural forms present in Stephen Whatcott’s paintings demonstrate instinctive mark-making while retaining a balanced composition.

Influenced primarily by punk rock and grunge music in his teens, and later by jazz, his work carries the mood and rawness of the former with the improvisational freedom of the latter. This serendipitous nature of the process acts as a guide when composing his work. The final image is therefore shaped by the unexpected events and adjustments encountered during the process.

The tension created within the picture plane is a crucial element of these paintings. Ranging from great, colossal walls of paint to more lyrical forms, the paintings develop through a constant dialogue between the existing marks and new decisions. The paintings are physical, both in technique and presence. Daily life shapes the process and the decisions made in the moment, but they resist narrative: nothing in them is illustrated or depicted. What's biographical is the process, not the picture.

What results is less a record of a single decision than of the negotiation that produced it. Each layer responds to the one beneath it, with instinct and structure in continuous tension.

Self-taught