Colour. It's what hits you first.

It's what engages your senses and makes you want to immerse yourself in the paintings of The Hughenden Hotel's artist-in-residence, Stephen James.

One Sydney reviewer called the colours "jewel-like" and you can't help wondering if this richness and depth can come out of tubes of paint, why more people aren't doing it.

As you move closer to the works, some spanning close to two metres, you realise that the colours are somehow faceted, that they shimmer with the resonance of a fine porcelain glaze. But you couldn't call them pretty.

A tension exists in each work that evokes a questioning. In one way it is at odds with the old-world charm of The Hughenden, but with the works firmly embedded in a painterly tradition, the effect created by this partnership is soul-satisfying.

Managing Director of The Hughenden, Elizabeth Gervay, herself an artist, first met Stephen when they were stuck in a small studio space at Sydney's College of Fine Arts (COFA) at the University of New South Wales.

She recalls moments of shared, quiet contemplation. "It was Steve studiously considering colours, seeking the depth of richness that oils can bring," says Elizabeth. "It was Steve considering composition...the balance...a meaning - and there I was struggling with the canvas, just looking to pass this undergrad course."

Stephen majored in painting and went on to complete his Masters in 1994. "His time wasn't wasted," she says, "those skills he acquired helped produce the rich canvases of today, somewhere between Bruegel and Boyd."

The Hughenden, a grand Victorian residence in the heart of Paddington, has held art exhibitions since it first opened its doors to the world as a Boutique Hotel. It is surrounded by over forty art galleries and is located at the centre of the "Soho of Sydney".

Exhibitors of The Hughenden have included one artist who became an Archibald winner, another a Wynne Prize winner, another one who became a war artist and another who begun to work for Geographic Magazine - but it was Stephen James who was chosen to become the resident artist of The Hughenden.

According to Elizabeth, his truth lies beyond his executed canvases. "Just look at his painting entitled 'The Lovers'", she urges, "A man, a woman - two people who long to be together through the journeys of time. It's rich in colour, rich in description, rich in untold love."

Another favourite is 'The Dancers'. "It's a dark canvas," she says, "with all the fears of truth and yet a light that glimmers hope that humanity forever seeks."

This use of intensive colour heightens this intenseness of mood and feeling. There is also a sensuousness in the strong colour, and in the quality of it - nothing is black or white, there's always a melding, a metonymic shimmering of joy and horror mixed in together. Stephen is comfortable with this mix.

"There's always in the paint, as in life, a sense of death and , Eros and Thalanos. Wherever there's beauty and joy and sex, by implication, death always follows. "No-one's entirely bleak or entirely joyous," he adds. "It's the thick juice of life, the colour and the texture of it that makes it all worthwhile - even when there are bleak stories to tell, there's always this tension, a sensuous sexiness of the experience of life, of being in the world."

Being just be a decorative painter has never interested Stephen. He thinks that while some people express themselves as that, within an abstraction of the physical world or by making something that's beautiful or attractive, and dealing with the intellectual and painterly problems of the composition or of the idea, the detachment leaves him unsatisfied.

Elizabeth feels Stephen's work continues to grow and develop hand in hand with the Hotel. "It continues to be a journey together. Stephen's works have developed throughout the years showing his ability to take the viewer beyond the canvas, to evoke a reaction. His work never goes unnoticed."

Perhaps its the circuitous route that Stephen James travelled before starting to paint that brings his work to this point. He was born in 1957 at Cessnock, a small coal mining town close to Newcastle, in eastern Australia and grew up in nearby Maitland.


When asked about his exposure to art as a child, Stephen remembers houses in the sixties that were more likely to have souvenir tea-towels adorning the walls than paintings. He recalls his grandmother having prints of paintings in the house but these were mainly religious and she was, he notes, of a previous generation.

"When they got rid of picture rails, they got rid of pictures," he says. "It was a visually arid time but somehow, the artist was always there in me."

His earliest memories of artistic recognition was at age five or six, illustrating biblical stories in a catechism workbook at the local Catholic school he attended. "We had a little rectangle box to draw in next to the story of the Last Supper or something and I was the only one in the class who drew people in period dress - that and the table seemed to fit better in the room than in the drawings of the other kids."

"I was always drawing. I kept lots and lots of little books, jotting pads that my mum and nanna would buy me, and drew passionately in them. Everything would have a narrative theme. There's be cartoons, or a series of stories that I'd act out in my head and then put down on paper."

There was a dearth of exposure to painting outside of religious prints and landscape paintings exhibited as part of the local agricultural shows. The local council library gave him access to books on the "masters". Stephen recalls being so disheartened when, in his teens, he was comparing his figurative sketches to those of Leonardo. Going back to some of those early drawings, especially one of his Down's Syndrome affected younger sister, he acknowledges that his efforts weren't bad. Apart from a teaching nun in fifth class being complimentary about Stephen's work during the fortnightly painting afternoons, he received no indication that being artist could be anything other than a pipe-dream.

Sitting across from him now, it's hard to believe. His work is currently on show at The Hughenden and during our interview, he takes a call from a Dutch art dealer who wants to show Stephen's work in Europe.

"Things are starting to happen," he says quietly.

It's a long way from the Maitland boy who spent many of his growing up years working long hours after school and on weekends in the family iceworks business. Now forty-four, Stephen can look back fondly at making suits of armour out of old machine parts when trade was slow. The colours of childhood years remain strong in his mind.

"There were paddocks, lucerne fields, bush greens; bright, bright orange of the calcium chloride brine that was in the iceworks tanks, rusty paint colours from the corrosion from all the brine and freezing compounds. White, being in the iceworks looking at ice and snow for most of the year. Brown - the Hunter River and the floods, the black-brown mud after the floods."

He talks of how the floods loom very large in the psyche of anyone who has ever lived in the Hunter River region and are part of its mythology and experience. "Everyone talks of the '55 flood. It's more important that when JFK died - everyone could tell you where they were when the flood hit."

After finishing school, he rejected the recommendations of advisers to pursue teacher training at university and ended up, at 20, training as a nurse. Between school and nursing, he'd worked for the Lands Department, trumping around the Australian bush as a surveyor's assistant, looking for adventures.

The first engagement with a "real" artist was meeting up with the husband of one of his girlfriend's friends at around age 19. He was a teacher, but he was also an installation artist doing part-time graduate study at Newcastle University. "It was pretty edgy and I went with them to a few exhibitions in Newcastle and Sydney." No-one he'd known before this time had been an artist or had known of any artists living in the Hunter region. The only artist that he'd been aware of having lived and worked within one hundred miles of Maitland was William Dobell.

In retrospect, Steve can see some similarities with his work and style. Stephen left Maitland in 1980 and moved to Sydney to pursue more study and to move from the "smallness" of regional Australia.

The work of Stephen James is predominantly figurative. He admits a longstanding interest in the narrative in pictures and exploring people and their relationships to the world around them. It goes back to his love of mythology and his obsession with it when he was young. It was the grand stories of people, the great narratives about people's lives and thoughts that really captured his imagination.

"When I first tried landscapes they seemed rather empty without a human relationship to them," he says. "It's similar to the way Sidney Nolan's works show the experience of people in the Australian environment, with its harshness and alienness. The figures in my work create the dynamism of the landscape and give it meaning."

The role for landscape in his work emerged following several journeys to far western New South Wales, painting amidst the sand-duned plains and spectacular rock formations. He was one of the students to join COFA artists/teachers, Idris Murphy and Terry O'Donnell, in the first of many outback expeditions - a program that, according to Idris, continues to be part of the COFA calendar and one that has produced a number of successful artists.

Stephen says the experiences created a space for him to find out what the Australian land meant to his work. Even though many of the painting are of interiors, there is always a visible horizontal line in the background or out a window. "Whatever happens is in relation to that landscape," he says. "The meeting of two forces - the idea of the margin as part of the Australian cultural experience. Land and sky, sky and sea, city and bush, there's conflict at the point of contact and it is deep in the Australian psyche."

His work, 'Heroes and Harlequins' sees these layers of narrative and landscape coming together - figures of men and women together in some social discourse but disconnected at a deep emotional level - while behind them, the stark land shimmers against a sky turning green with heat.

Artist, teacher and co-author of visual arts text, 'A.R.T: art, research, theory', Craig Malyon, is enthusiastic about Stephen's art. "There is something in his painting technique, a lustre that draws you inside the canvas. It's in the glaze and the light, you are not stopped at the surface."

In considering this, Stephen says it comes from the sensuousness of the paint. "It's application is a sexy thing." He descibes the putting on of the paint as a "gestural stroking" movement. To fail to get that lustre is to him, a failure to achieve some sensual attraction. If the paint is muddy or flat, he sees it as not vibrating with the that it should - not reflecting what the paint is capable of.

Always working in oils, he rejected acrylics at an early stage finding the cold and calculated way one needed to work to get any effect "repugnant". The sensuousness of oils is in the way the paint moves when it is working, a "psychic and physical fusion just like sex". This is not to say this painter over-intellectualises whilst painting. "You just do it," he says, "and explain it later."

"With oils there is an inherent lustre, a tactile attraction in them. If you treat them in the right way they evolve into something vibrant - there is a resonance in what you do of the process that has gone on. As you build it up and increase the density of the layers or the freeness of the gestures, the whole experience builds up towards the final result . There's a temporal aspect to the paint so it builds up a story."

The main emotional driver for Stephen in pursuing figurative painting in the first instance was laying to rest the ghosts of intensive care nursing, a field he pursued for a decade. He was good at it but it left some battle scars.

He has an affinity with expressionistic art, particularly the German art that was made after the First World War, art that attempted to make sense of the horror in contrast to the rather idealistic pre-WWI art movements. Max Beckman from this period, Scottish artist John Bellany and Australia's Albert Tucker have been particularly influential.

"When Tucker was painting in the forties during WWII, his work was an internal reaction to what he was seeing. One work in particular, an expressionist one about a flier he'd encountered after a crash or something, spoke to me," says Stephen. "I think Tucker was employed as a hospital orderly around this time and he was working through the meaning of horror through painting. It's putting into visual terms the unspoken internal experience that surrounds you."

"Beckman also did this. Having worked as a medic in the German trenches, his post-WWI works are quite stark as he tried to work through the horrors and his style only developed after he had come to terms with that to a degree."

Stephen feels a connection to these experiences, having a few horrors of his own to work through. He attributes the darkness in his earlier work to this process but states that it was a matter of learning the visual language to express these experiences through going to art school. Looking at Stephen's most recent work, the tensions of life's undulations are still very much present, but the brooding darkness has lifted. He sees it himself and attributes much of the shift to becoming a father to Alexandra, now nine, and Patrick, six.

"When Alexandra was born, she shone like a comet - a cleansing force that let more light in," he says. "There's still good and evil, dark and light, but I guess I'm essentially romantic in my sensibilities."

It is clear that it's not some form of abstract aesthetic that drives Stephen James. He explores how the world affects the mind and the spirit and how that is reiterated and brought out through art. He admits to not being able to do art that is detached from the immediacy and pride of human experience.

"It's an artist's job to be able to choose things so that people can recognise those inner conflicts and feelings in the world. This is why I value that people buy my paintings - it's because something in the work has spoken to them in some way."

Elizabeth Gervay agrees that Stephen's work resonates with something inside people. "That's the common experience of a lot of people who have bought them," she says. "We're pleased to have been part of his success - his works have travelled to homes both overseas & interstate. The Hughenden recognises Stephen James' ability and continues to support his brilliance."

This article was first published in "Arts and Antiques New South Wales".

HOME