Stephanie Fawbert Along the Shoreline

Stephanie Fawbert takes a walk on the wild side

Walking into the subdued lighting at the BlackShed Gallery you enter another world – Stephanie’s Fawbert’s In the Wild Wood. This is a place of fairy stories, stories and memories. Although it is a little way out of Hastings  and it was a wet morning, HOT’s Lauris Morgan-Griffiths went along  to  the gallery on the edge of the woods near Robertsbridge. 

Stephanie Fawbert Riverbank

As you enter the gallery hosting In The Wild Wood, the muted lighting evokes thoughts of the dark side of life – strange men wandering amongst the trees, violence and threat, as opposed to new life emerging, light and birdsong. But that is the way the mind tends to work, often going to the dark side.

However, these woods are not malevolent – the trees are not gong to reach down and obstruct you, roots are not going to trip you up, here there are lakes which reflect light and being beside water is always comforting and uplifting.

These paintings certainly tell a story, there is an edginess to some of them, a haunting feeling of something about to happen which fires tension – something in the manner that film stills can create.

Although Fawbert lives in Hastings, so far she has not been drawn to the sea in her work, unlike so many artists who venture down to Hastings; it is the quietude, solitude and serenity of being surrounded by woods and lakes that resonates with her. However the paintings are not family picnic snaps, there is a feeling of not exactly loneliness but alone-ness in them. Canoes are a repeated motif – a metaphor for adventure, travel.

Stephanie Fawbert, Wake, oil on canvas

The scale is extraordinary, with people appearing small and almost insignificant  against the grandeur of the landscape, the paintings induce a sense of wonder as you look up through the trees to the sky and down into the water. Although it seems at first like an almost empty canvas, there are tiny figures and even habitation in the form of holiday homes or a conglomeration of vehicles at a country fair – which are also swamped into insignificance by their surroundings  

These images are not the result of complete imagination; they have been painted and edited in Fawbert’s mind from sketches, photographs she has taken or those taken by friends when they have visited places that Fawbert thinks might be interesting. She doesn’t like to reveal the names of the places she paints because she would like people to bring their own stories and memories to the landscapes.

Her work is continually evolving but fundamentally she thinks of herself as a landscape painter. She has, in the past, painted portraits and abstracts, but she is at home in the environment, humans in nature, part of it rather than separate. Elements that she loves and found great solace in during lockdown. She is feeling her way back into her art and gaining confidence after taking a break for a while doing other things– amongst other things working in Gambia with puppets in health education.

Stephanie Fawbert Holiday homes

Having moved from watercolours to oils, Fawbert employs similar watercolour processes. She confuses by appearing to produce detailed brushwork whereas she is happy to let the paint drip and blur, sometimes resulting in happy accidents; a beautiful treeline or cloudscape formed out of unintentional drips

The paintings are built up in thin layers of  washes and paint of intense colour, which can transform a lighthearted, happy atmosphere from her source material into a brooding, mysterious atmosphere.

When I first saw her paintings I thought of the painter Peter Doig, I suppose because of one of his images of a solitary  canoe on a lake – a fabulous painter who also loved the outside world. However, her inspiration goes further than that. “The painters I am inspired and influenced by are German Romantics like Caspar David Friedrich and Arnold Bocklin, Modern Romantics like Peter Doig and Northern Romantics such as Munch, Karin Mamma Andersson and Anna Berger as well as the great edgy queen herself, Marlene Dumas.” Surprisingly, she also loves photographer Cindy Sherman’s early ‘film stills’ self portraits – before she got into the over dramatised self portraits she is now known for.

Hidden among farm buildings, the BlackShed Gallery is off the A21 – that bit is easy, but it can sometimes be a little difficult to find with the twists and turns, specially in the dark. Not that it was dark when we went but the gallery is certainly worth seeking out.

Because of the terrible weather, rain and mud, I sadly wasn’t able to revisit Jim Roseveare’s extraordinary installation in the woods nearby which is now slowly disintegrating, mud to mud, going back whence it came – a poignant, romantic sculpture. Definitely worth taking in when you visit. 

Stephanie Fawbert, In The Wild Wood, is at the BlackShed Gallery, Russet Farm, Robertsbridge TN32 5NG unil 11 February. Open Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-3pm.

Also in: Visual Arts