SMAC Art Gallery is pleased to present Thrown Together, an exhibition of new paintings by Simon Stone.

Simon Stone’s new series of paintings portrays a personal exploration of elusive memories, dreams and recollections – the silhouette of a receding landscape, framed cityscapes, lone figures or female forms, distinctly recurring motifs, lines, holes, slices and brief stops. Compositionally the paintings are split and fragmented, divided into a series of singular conversations and moments caught in their own time. Simple and complex, the paintings are other-worldly and magical, while remaining quietly every-day.

Stone explains his creative process: ‘I do not think about meaning, it comes out in the end, what is meaningful to me…I spot something and I take it further’.

As the exhibition title suggests, ideas are ‘thrown together’. Seemingly unrelated objects, people and places, each with their own identity and meaning for the artist, are placed together on the canvas – intuitively structured and fluidly executed in ‘the way it had to happen’ so that ‘it could not have been anything else’. There is a juxtaposing of separate ideas and visual commentaries, but Stone ties these together in his own internalised vocabulary and library of references. Working unconsciously or otherwise, Stone meticulously assembles a ‘visual message’.

Like sketches from memory, these narratives are moments in time and the viewer is allowed to look through the ‘window of a reality’ that Stone creates

Stone draws his inspiration from newspaper clippings, images in magazines, photographs, travels and the world he observes around him. Watercolour sketches contained in the artist’s chronologically catalogued sketch books are also brought back to the present, inspiring new works.

‘I work from drawings, and then it changes… better… more, inevitable- more right. I know then it is the only way it could be, that it had to happen this way’ says Stone.

Still life painting also forms part of this new body of work. Here, large numbers of objects are arranged together and compiled as a series of props providing the various elements in his creative equations. Stone explains that they are straightforward, simple and direct ‘observations and object lessons’.