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Exhibition by Robert Stone
Robert Snell writesRobert Stone is an artist of rare power and energy. He trained at Brighton in the late 70s, and spent an important part of his apprenticeship in the unique life classes run by Dennis Creffield. Now based in London, he has exhibited widely, and he is an experienced and highly respected teacher. The main focus of the current exhibition is Robert's very recent work on press images of violent conflict, in particular a photograph of the school siege at Beslan in North Ossetia, Russia, last year. In charcoal drawings and a large pastel Robert uncovers the compelling, mythic and tragic dimensions of the image, while never allowing us to forget that it is also a depiction of specific and contemporary horrors. As in his drawing of an American soldier with an Iraqi prisoner, which is also part of a larger series deriving from newspaper and television imagery, Robert is concerned to reclaim the image from the banality which media saturation can confer. He re-invests it, and us, with feeling - feeling we may not welcome but which can nevertheless bring us back into contact with life. He is also showing a collection of recent landscape paintings mostly made in Languedoc-Roussillon, where he has a house with his wife Rachel, who is a sculptor, and their three children.
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