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Our Steven Campbell Trust calendar April image, draws on what was to become a leitmotif for Steven for over a decade: Pinocchio.

 
Our family has for many, many years spent our summers in Italy with the majority of our time spent between Tuscany and Umbria around Cortona and Lago Trasimeno.

 
We first started going when our 3 children were small and it was then that we discovered a theme park on the outskirts of Perugia called Citta Della Domenica or Sunday City. I use the term theme park very loosely, as the park was set up in the 60’s and has changed little since then. It is part nature reserve, part sculpture-park but it does indeed have a theme and that theme is Pinocchio, not the Disneyland cartoon character but the much darker original story by Carlo Collodi.

 
Dotted around the park are various scenes from the story, some funny but others quite frightening, especially for young kids.

 
One in particular which struck Steven, was of Pinocchio sitting very dismally in a dark cave-like prison shackled to the wall. He did in fact make a painting of it called Pinocchio in Chains.

 
The Pinocchio here however is modelled on the souvenirs that crowd all the shops in the surrounding area from Lucca to Siena. They come as jointed figures, as in the painting, ranging in size from key rings to actual puppets, some even come as comically collapsible figures when you press the bottom of their stand.

 
Steven has chosen, on this occasion, to combine him with a female protagonist, a loosely based Heidi type figure, a pubescent girl/woman straddling both those worlds while embracing the tree that we could conjecture had been the one used to make our hero.

 
Steven had since the 80’s, with his Painting Ding Dong in the National Gallery of Scotland, drawn upon this female figure complete with her childlike braids, juxtaposed with her womanly strength or self knowledge.

 
Further Pinocchio images and information can be found in articles relating to Steven’s 1993 exhibition at the Talbot Rice Centre in Edinburgh, called Pinocchio’s Present.

Carol Campbell.

Continuing with our 2020 feature of images from our Steven Campbell Calendar, our March selection is:

Portrait of the Lost Travelogue Writer

This painting is a personal favourite of mine being as it is dominated by the self-portrait of Steven. Although he never deliberately set out to paint himself it was rather just an innate understanding of his own face, which he would often pass his hand over while painting.

It also has a true poetry (like Man who Climbs Maps) mixed with the ridiculous quality of a Wodehouse, Bertie Wooster scenario.

The background is dominated by 3 recognisable tourist attractions, the Pyramids/Sphinx, the Vatican and Westminster Abbey. The harlequin styled figure to the right was inspired by an old postcard Steven bought in Aix en Provence while visiting Cezanne’s studio at Jas de Bouffan.

The blue pyramid shapes were inspired by a visit to the Picasso museum in the Marais, Paris and the Las Meninas series. He took the Picasso pyramid shape and turned it around adapting it to his needs while still acknowledging the original.

The falling figure harks back to his drawing of The Fern’s revenge on the Gardener, while the optical illusion skull was inspired again by old French postcards and the work of Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin with his profiled heads forming a white vase, which do you see first?

As in all of Stevens work, we’ve come upon our protagonist midst scene, like a still from a movie where we can guess at what has passed but must make up our own script as to his future.

Carol Campbell

Continuing our 2020 feature of images from our Steven Campbell Calendar, our February selection is: ‘Crash Cubism’ (The Neo-Classical Period).

Carol Campbell:

This painting was created as part of Steven’s 1990 exhibition, On Form & Fiction, at the Third Eye Centre Glasgow,  which is now the CCA.

The main gallery space was given over to the installation of a faux museum with large drawings forming the illusion of hand painted wallpaper with the paintings hung as if in a museum setting, complete with benches, table and ‘Je t’aims . . . moi non plus’ playing on a reel to reel tape recorder. In the side room Steven decided to exhibit stand alone large scale oils on canvas ,of which Crash Cubism was one. 

Duncan MacMillan wrote the following in his book on Steven called ‘The Story So Far’:

‘The theme of English twentieth-century aesthetics, it’s particular struggle with Modernism (and it’s deluded belief that art itself held the ‘answer’) seems to be taken up in Crash Cubism.’  

At this point in time Steven was reading a lot about Ruskin and architecture and design in general. His love of film is also part of the fabric that makes this exhibition the tour de force it has been acknowledged to be. Tarkovsky mixed with Westerns throws up a lot of recurring images used both in the installation and the stand alone paintings.

Crash Cubism is seen at that crucial point of danger like many of Steven’s paintings. It’s the ‘still’ from the movie where we the viewer get to see the danger approaching along the trestle track, about to shatter the cubist painting and hurtle our hero/the artist to an unknown fate.

John Ferry, Trustee, The Steven Campbell Trust:

For a number of years now, my fellow Trustees and I (The Steven Campbell Trust) have been delighted to receive as a Christmas Gift from Carol Campbell, a wonderful Steven Campbell Calendar, designed by Carol. These are always cherished and a delightful way to share Steven’s work and to be reminded throughout the year, of his wonderful paintings.

Recently Carol suggested that we make this a feature for our website, so for 2020 we’ve decided to share these works with you, with anecdotes from Carol on each painting.

We wish you a very Happy New Year and hope you enjoy!

Anecdote by Carol Campbell:

This painting was based on an actual sign we saw on the gate of a house in the hilltop village of Paciano in Umbria.

We had eaten lunch in the tiny cafe in the town and went for a wander afterwards and it was then Steven spotted the sign.

I’m embarrassed to admit that lacking a camera to photograph the image he pinched the sign, but at least it was put to good use!

The painting then became realised during his John Byrne, Paisley Pattern period, but you can see the warning and the symbols of the original sign such as the knife, gun and dog.

The Lytton Strachey look alike is Steven, with a nod to our own family with the addition of the little girl.

A Very Happy New Year from The Steven Campbell Trust!

Link to original image:

The Steven Campbell Trust are delighted to share the recent publication of: The Art and Life of Steven Campbell by his wife Carol Campbell, published in Luncheon Magazine, 2019.

We would like to take this opportunity to share the introduction with you and provide a link for purchase.

From introduction:

‘The Scottish artist Steven Campbell is best known as a painter, but his wider work was postmodern, encompassing a range of interdisciplinary media. He was a graduate of Glasgow School of Art, which he attended after several years working at the Clydebridge Steelworks. He was proud of his working-class roots and this social context informed his work, which included performance, community art projects, appropriation, writing and immersive installations as well as his much-lauded paintings. He passed away in 2007 aged 54, and efforts are now being made to recontextualise his work and reveal his legacy.

Fashion designer Beca Lipscombe and fashion historian Mairi MacKenzie recently gave the 2019 Steven Campbell Trust Annual Lecture, entitled ‘Dressing Above Your Station’. They looked at Campbell’s life and work, reflecting upon his depiction of textiles and clothing as well as his personal wardrobe, in order to recount their own aspirations growing up in Scotland, and the routes they took in an attempt to develop a vernacular aesthetic’.

In this interview Steven’s widow, Carol Campbell, sits down with Mairi and Beca for a wonderfully personal talk about her life with Steven and chooses seven of her favourite works by him.

Above: Carol and Steven on the day of the Fulbright interview, London 1982.

Purchase link:

Luncheon Issue 8-2

https://www.kdpresse.com/en/LUNCHEON/

Love: A Very Particular Vision

Exhibition Publication

19 January – 25 March 2018 

Publication: Love_StevenCampbell_webversion_v.2

Love was an exhibition of twelve large scale multi-media collages made between 1988 and 1991 by Steven Campbell, one of Glasgow’s most celebrated artists. The exhibition was curated by Linsey Young, 19th January – 25th March 2018, Tramway, Glasgow.

Campbell began the works on his return to Scotland in 1987 following a five year period of living and working in New York. The collages represent a little known, experimental  area of  Campbell’s practice which also includes clay, plaster and papier mache sculpture, drawing, printmaking and textile design.

While Campbell’s paintings were often executed with terrific speed – a canvas, he claimed, could be completed in five days – these large scale, predominantly two- dimensional collages were each made over a period of weeks, in part because of the laborious way in which the artist chose to work with material (hand painting and then adhering individual strands of string rather than painting once they were integrated into the collage). However the artist’s wife Carol Campbell has also attributed this change of a pace to a need for an activity to accompany a period of reflection and contemplation, a form of therapy through which Campbell could come to terms with the changes in his life following the family’s return from America.

Completed at the kitchen table, amid the rhythms of family life the resulting collages are testament to Campbell’s modest needs, his restless imagination and experimental nature but perhaps even more so to his sensitivity to the world around him. In these works we see a manifestation of the most powerful cornerstones of his life, his family, the natural world and his boundless imagination.

Love was curated by Linsey Young in collaboration with Tramway. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue including a new essay by Michael Bracewell, supported by Creative Scotland, a copy of which we are pleased to share online for the first time.