Stephen Duncalf

Description

The amazing paintings of Stephen Duncalf, produced from the early 1970s until an abrupt cessation in 1999, were “consciously hand-crafted objects, with house paint and hardboard to the fore, square ramin mouldings, ‘the whiff of turpentine.’ As the paintings pile up we get a better idea of the world according to Stephen Duncalf: the nonchalant lodger in a backdrop of formica and laminates, forbidding stairwells, the mortal leisure of the remnant armchair; a flaneur amidst abandoned mangles and pram wheels in the brambles; subsisting in an Edward Hopperish café with ‘a quality of damp fag ash pervading the rose festooned wallpaper.’ Or again in the flight to the attic, its wonderland of model railway and battlefield layouts. This ‘quite mundane, often trivial subject matter’ served in his search for, as he put it, ‘ways of indicating a bush without describing it.’ His aim of creating ‘ambiguities where shape and colour can be broken down… into another synthetic realm,’ suggests his cherished Paul Nash in whose own paintings the ‘relationship of parts creates a mystery.’ As in the case of Nash, or Kandinsky, or Schwitters, the sophisticated eye endows a structure mesmeric with tension.”