Out of Sight (North Sea)

Stephen Todd

Notable Achievements 2023
Notable Achievements 2021 
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Read about his artistic journey

What makes a story? It can be hard to tell, especially when stories so thoroughly make up the fabric of life. As writer Joan Didion famously wrote, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”, so do we even want to separate life from story?  For Masters artist Stephen Todd, it’s a tricky predicament - each of his paintings muses on how we spin narratives, how they record the past, and how they alter our futures. With a focal point in mind, Todd often begins by researching the historic significance of a place or event, then begins to loosen any internalised facts. Through scenic paintings, he opens up a landscape to speculation, wonder, nostalgia, and even a sense of low-lying despair.  

Through layering marks, colours and forms using gouache, Indian ink, pastels and graphite, he captures the many superimpositions of history and its haunting spectres. For example, in one piece he weaves the grandeur of Greek mythology into his immediate perception of the Humber estuary. Compressing time zones and juxtaposing spatial distance, Todd purveys history in a way that makes leaps in imagination that are often stunted in today’s fast-paced, technologically filtered world. 

Todd has a really unique history himself – he was a Social Worker in Mental Health for 10 years, recalling that it was “something that gave me the privilege of seeing deeply into other people’s lives”. He then decided to switch lanes to an artistic career, telling us that it was the life-drawing classes with John Epstein that had a truly formative effect on him. “I went to class thinking I wanted to learn about perspective and technique, but came away realising that was all secondary”. Instead he realised “painting and drawing are fundamentally about instinctive responses” – a mentality that infuses his practice to this day.