Across the three years of the Fine Art Degree artists come in each term to present their work and life experiences in the industry to the students. These are a great part of the course as they show students what life is like after degree and how different artists work/ present their pieces.
(November 1st) The first one of the year was the contemporary painter, Stuart Cumberland. He is greatly interested in Manhattan Art which is rather aggressive and mechanical. Cumberland uses block colours to express a lack of emotion and depth, making them appear extremely shallow. He based his pallet choice for his art work on the basic colours found across the internet. His paintings are always large in scale often using stencils and oil paint. His most recent exhibition was, at The Approach in London in 2011, in which he presented four pieces; '4 Circle Paintings'. As well as exhibiting his work in the UK he was also involved in an exhibition in Belgium. It was during this period that Cumberland was having a lot of success with his art selling a great deal of work.
(Some paintings from the '4 Circle Paintings' exhibition)
(Andy Irons, 2011, Oil on linen, 195x160cm)
(Leslie Nielsen, 2011, Oil on linen, 195x160cm)
(Ingrid Pitt, 2011, Oil on linen, 195x160cm)
However his success came to a sudden stop in 2012 leading Cumberland to have a breakdown. So during this tough time he applied to a school in Rome in the hope to escape the troubles at home. After a successful application Cumberland went to Rome in the early moths of 2013. It was a new opportunity for him to become sociable once again after such a solitary career over the last few years. During this time he also raised the question 'What can a painting do that other things can't?'.
(BW240, 2011, Oil on linen, 240x190cm)
Cumberland sees the studio as a place to release his energy that he keeps stored inside of him. During his early works he was greatly interested in the Fort/Da theory; this explores the erasing of something, translated to English it means there and gone. His current influences are; Jasper Johns, Christopher Wool, Christopher Williams. He also commented on the fact that he finds it easy to make large paintings due to his large bodily gestures, he finds working on small paintings too difficult and confined.
