Today we’d like to introduce you to Ian Stewart.
Hi Ian, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Abstracts that had once involved months of smashing paint, keen observation, noodling, starting over, happy-little-accidents, some technique, diligence and joy had turned to rote churned out predictabilities. I stopped. I waited. A new idea would come soon! I didn’t paint for over a year until I (along with you as well, dear reader) had boredom imposed upon me. It was only a couple months into that whole global you-know-what before I had completely devolved. Furious to have to think again. Thinking those pesky (nah) imposing thoughts, in a way I hadn’t since I was continuously schlepped from one activity to the next in the Stewart family automobile decades prior. The closest I imagine I’ve ever felt to sleep paralysis. A terrible hypnosis facilitated by the endless rush of trees and speed limit signs outside my mommy’s Volvo. Still… preferable to the endless Rush Limbaugh rambling about whatever-the-fuck stupid shit he believes on the inside. Then lightning struck the flower. I wanted to paint a piece of imaginary wallpaper. A meditation with no clear focal point, encouraging the attentive mind to wander. An iconographic image plucked from the collective unconscious and used to evoke what I jokingly refer to as celebratory existentialist neo-nostalgia. Images of unfettered childhood joy, youthful recklessness, gleefully degenerate behavior. The good stuff. Rusty bikes, beautiful girls, skunky beer, stale cigarettes, melancholic animals and of course every child’s savior… the ice cream truck. Actually, the best stuff. After I completed the first painting, I thought, “This is going to sell.” I posted it. 15 minutes later, a text… “how much?” The churn is gone.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Every road has bumps. The hardest thing for me has been moving past the idea of my paintings JUST being wallpaper. Painting imaginary wallpaper is a great springboard, but it had to grow into more, to evolve in a way where I wasn’t merely repeating an image but additionally exploring themes and telling stories. I struggled for a while with this until someone said to me that I would eventually find a way to fuse the expressiveness of my old abstracts with the more cerebral aspects of my new conceptual work. That helped give me a new direction and concretize goals. Further struggles lead to me naming my series “There’s something wrong with that one,” which has only helped to give me even more direction. Like George Washington said: “bumpless roads are fuckin’ blech.”
(Btw whatever you think about me as you read my maximalist diatribe, just know that as I wrote this, regardless of how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember the word “cerebral”, so I went to an online thesaurus and typed in “thinky.” So yeah… that says a bunch about my brain)
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I consider myself a conceptual painter. However, I also work in 2D animation. And it is not lost on me that my experience as an animator has perfectly primed me to repeatedly paint the same image over and over and over again. I love my work in animation, yet still, I am thrilled to be moving more into painting as a career. I recently brought some paintings to some buyers, and seeing my work find a wall to hang on is incredibly heartening and encouraging. I have a show in Temecula in June, too. These victories keep me fed and creating.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
The recent writers’ and actor strikes have affected the animation industry and turned my already inconsistent industry into a barren wasteland of work. This… well… sucked. But it did force me to begin to consider painting to now be my full-time career and dig my heels into it in a way I haven’t before. I now get up early and paint all day, which now affords me the greatly undervalued ability to fail. I don’t care when I mess up a piece now. I toss it out and start over happily. In the future, I hope to find stability through an audience of buyers so I can keep living life calmly and with purpose. And using my free time to make my own animations, because the animation world rules. I want my painting to support my animation, not the other way around.
Pricing:
- 1 ft x 1 ft = $250, regardless of how many materials I use. If a painting’s done it’s done, and with me that’s what you pay for.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ianmarkstewart.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianmarkstewart/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thecartoonshow7450
Image Credits
Ian Mark Stewart
