| Dukinfield born Stafford, one of three children, was raised in the Manchester area and was encouraged as a teenager by L.S.Lowry the legendary painter who visited Stafford’s mother’s greengrocery shop in Hyde. He later attended Hyde College and in 1996 took the well trodden path between the Irwell and the Tamar and settled at Long Rock near Penzance in Cornwall. Here his work flourished - and with it his reputation and burgeoning exhibition career - as he produced imaginative composites of the sands of Mounts Bay between Penzance and Marazion and the redbrick streets of his native north west. As with all accomplished artists Stafford has his artistic influences and quotes them in both style and subject matter. The quirkiness of Lowry or earthy expressionism of Lowndes are recalled though nobody has so outlandishly and humorously placed memory - objects from his past - for example the red brick Victorian ‘Devonport House’ in Stalybridge where he grew up - onto the sandy sub-Mediterranean platform of his adopted Cornish home. In one extravagant picture ‘Blue House on the Mount’ Devonport House is placed as a castle atop St. Michael’s Mount where it stands like a sports trophy or talisman. Out of the chaotic fantasy of ‘Blue House on the Beach’ or ‘The Moor, Falmouth’ emerges as authentic vision from a distinctive and deeply idiosyncratic artist who wears early and later lives on his sleeve. There is no doubting the expressive vigour, strong colour and imaginative warmth of Stafford’s crowded beach scenes on which certain images recur: the girl cartwheeling invokes family legend and his Auntie Dot, the skipping girls and the ubiquitous donkey recall childhood memories. In ‘Black Donkey’ this animal assumes singular iconic significance occupying the whole picture space. Such characters appear in Stafford’s indoor imagination too, for example, Dot and stuffed dog Trixie in ‘On the Underground,’ a picture about a rare trip by the artist to London. Objects also possess the resonance of memory creating a personal pantheism, the ramshackle cars recalling his father’s Robin Reliant and the fairgrounds the eagerly awaited travelling show. Stafford extends his figures into the third dimension where they become like floppy dolls recalling Hans Bellmer’s surreal mannequins or Karel Appel’s Cobra personages. These rawly sculpted figures are modelled in painted plaster around wood armatures and chicken wire and remind us of the importance to him of Picasso whose primitive vision and intimate accord between manipulation of materials and the transformative power of the imagination have informed aspects of Stafford’s work. PETER DAVIES. FEBRUARY 2007. |
