Artist : Andrew Stahl 
Technique : Oil on canvas
Year : 2017
Size : 243 x 305 cm

Andrew Stahl is a British artist and educator whose career has spanned over 50 years. He cites Italy to be one of the most inspirational places on earth for him, especially Rome; the capital city that left a great impression on him as a young scholarship student at the British School over 40 years ago.

He spent his free time walking around Rome and discovered many beautiful things on the surface walls of Italian architecture. The Pantheon and the Piazza Navona in particular as well as the Villa Borghese and the Villa D’Este in Tivoli with its unique fountains. It was the fountains that really struck the young artist at the time, and so he started making fountain paintings where the dancing water inspired him to get expressive with his work. 

He writes: “The fountains were wicked and divinely surprising. A whole series of fountain paintings ensued, where the spouting water provided an excuse to play with the liquidity of paint and with the physical fountains to bring in the solidity of the object in contrast to the fugitive nature of the water. The physically encompassing and playful nature of the fountains in Tivoli encouraged the making of large scale panoramic paintings – the potential for making paintings that had a both a large scale and a playful decorative scale, the minute decorative patterns and features on fountains in contrast to the massive physicality of the stone fountains’.”

“Roma” is a 2017 recollection of this love at first sight. The water fanning out forms a contrasting shape to the abstract background and geometrical shapes. The brilliant blue and passion red draw the eyes in to look deeper and notice all of Stahl’s intricate details featuring symbols and accents.