Steph Fawbert
Steph Fawbert is a painter, living and working in Hastings, East Sussex. She studied fine art at Newcastle in the 1980s but then went on to pursue a career, first in national newspapers and then in community development in Africa and the UK. She has returned to painting in the last 12 years, working first on large format watercolours but now focusing more on oil painting.
Her artistic inspirations include Caspar David Friedrich, Mama Anderson, Cindy Sherman and Anna Bjerger. She comes from a family of storytellers and her pictures always contain an element of storytelling within them and the viewer is invited to make their own interpretation of the narrative possibilities presented in the images. She has a deep engagement with the painterly process, building up paintings with thin washes, allowing drips and gestural mark making to inform the image.
In Steph’s work, she is concerned They often feel like something is about to happen. In them, we recognise our everyday interactions with nature and the world around us. The paintings are concerned with the familiar but have a heightened sense of reality. Her approach is a little edgy, filmic, even voyeuristic and the paintings teeter on a knife edge between this tension and a more nostalgic, romantic place.