Notes

After phases working as a realist, symbolist and expressionist painter, Simon Stone, in the early 1990s, began developing a new lyrical and allegorical style that fused aspects of his previous periods. Informed by his explorations of spatial design and the layering of pictorial elements in earlier paintings, Stone began to segment and partition his compositions, as well as float pictures within pictures. This new “regnant style” was “fully revealed”, writes the artist’s biographer Lloyd Pollak, in the “dreamy serenity” of The Soldier who Lost his Rifle (lot 88), an important work from 1999.¹ Produced three years after the artist’s move from Johannesburg to Knysna, the composition is dominated by a central male figure, but additionally features a female nude and rural landscape – two key motifs from Stone’s repertoire. The painting collapses details of Stone’s biography (he was a military conscript in 1970), influences (Malcolm Morley, Robert Rauschenberg, Fra Angelico) and method (he often uses photographs, both his own and found sources) into an enigmatic statement.
Stone’s collage-like method of composing his paintings from disparate figural elements informs many of the works in the Powell Collection, including Landscape and New York (lot 89) and Red with Sea (lot 90). Between 1986 and 2011, Stone executed over a dozen paintings with photo-like images floated over fields of saturated cadmium-based red. The gestural lines appearing in Red with Sea are a counterpoint to the fastidious illusionism of his reproductions of photos. These “gestural improvisations”² are another recurring hallmark of Stone’s painting, as is evident in Portrait of a Girl with an Abstract Design on Her Shoulder (lot 93), but he remains a painter primarily interested in the human figure. “The things that are important to me are other people, the places where we live, the buildings, the things we deal with – PCs and cups, knives and forks, radios.”³ Stone is also a capable still-life painter. He returned to the genre in 1999, after abandoning it in 1981, and has continued to produce a small but steady output of works depicting fishing lead weights, cardboard boxes and plastic containers. Still Life with Tupperware and Mirror (lot 91) typifies his painterly skill at transforming banal objects into extraordinary presences. Landscape and New York highlights the importance of wilderness landscapes, in particular the Karoo, which Stone frequently visits to paint.

^1. Lloyd Pollak (2013) Simon Stone: Collected Works, Cape Town: SMAC, page 121.
^2. Ibid. Page 222
^3. Sean O’Toole (2009), interview with the artist, 17 April, Cape Town.

Provenance

Knysna Fine Art Gallery, Knysna, 4 January 2007.

The Oliver Powell and Timely Investments Trust Collection.

Exhibited

Standard Bank Art Gallery, Johannesburg, Simon Stone: A Retrospective Exhibition, 9 July to 14 September 2013.

Literature

Lloyd Pollak (2013) Collected Works — Simon Stone, Stellenbosch: SMAC Gallery, illustrated in colour on page 120.