“When you can’t be a player, you become introspective.”
Stephen Nothling
The Australian painter Stephen
Nothling was the kid in the playground with the coke bottle glasses who was
unable to catch the ball and consequently excluded from team sports. He was
born with the genetically inherited oculocutaneous albinism, a condition
that left him with 10% vision in his right eye and a cataract in the left that
he describes as the “black hole of nothingness.”
As he told the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation "I began painting because I wasn't very good at anything else. I was
born with a sort of quite severe problem with my eyes which affected me for a
really long time. I'm nearly blind in my right eye and there's problems with my
left eye and that kind of restricts you when you're a kid. I couldn't catch a
ball, I still can't catch a ball, I always used to sit in the front row at
school in the front row of the class. This
sounds really pathetic but it's not, you just sort of go inward and I think I
just started to draw.”
In his early twenties whilst studying at the Queensland Collage of Art
he threw away his glasses and started working up close and personal with his
painting.
About which he says "The one thing that defines my work is that
once I step away from a painting, more than a couple of meters, I can't actually
see what I've done, so I just work very closely… I just invented what I wanted
to be and I invented how to paint.”
Now in his early fifties and because of his condition, a non-driver,
Nothling’s subject matter reflects his backyard and most recently the suburban Brisbane
street he calls home and walks along on a daily basis.
As he said about his 2014 exhibition On Special at the Woolloongabba Art Gallery “The
still lifes are full of objects that surround me at home. The landscapes are
places where I’ve been and show incidents that have occurred. Sometimes I make
things up but not very often. The portraits are generally me although I’m not a
very good narcissist.”
With a sentiment Nothling encapsulated in his statement to The Art
News Portal’s Briar Francis “I’ve attempted
to portray an acceptance and celebration of the everyday and the possibility of
a little bit of poetry in the ordinary.”
Nothling’s
current exhibition The Last Street
in Highgate Hill is on show at the Museum
of Brisbane until the 31st of January.
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