Fire and Ice

A retrospective of the environmental landscape paintings of the late Stephen Read

18-25 October 2026

Stephen Read was an established painter who died in July 2022 at the age of 64 after a long and debilitating illness called Fabry Disease. My son and I have planned this retrospective of his paintings, numbering approximately 40 works in oil. Stephen continued to paint throughout his life while enduring many operations including a kidney transplant, two open heart surgeries, spinal surgery, to name a few. His artwork played a vital role in keeping him optimistic throughout his continual battle with illness.

The disease unfortunately curtailed his opportunities to exhibit during his lifetime. However, his physical disability meant he was a keen observer of the world from a very different perspective than most. He received a BA from Wimbledon College of Art and an MA from Rhode Island School of Design in America. His time in the states and his subsequent painting fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Rhode Island gave his work a transatlantic edge. During this time, he maintained a life-long friendship with the writer Denis Johnson who was another fellow at the art centre. Johnson later became a keen collector of Stephen’s paintings. Upon Stephen’s return to England in the mid-eighties, Stephen’s subject matter became more personalised in his depictions of England. He photographed and filmed the British coastline and the fields of rural Suffolk where he frequented. In his later paintings, his vision as an artist was fully realised.

Stephen’s paintings earned numerous awards and accolades over his career. His work was included in many prestigious exhibitions including the Jackson’s Painting Prize, the Threadneedle Prize, the Lynn Painter-Stainer Prize, the Westmoreland Landscape Prize, and was the winner of the Dulwich Picture Gallery Friends Exhibition in 2006.

Art and the Environment

Stephen’s ongoing concern for the environment was a key subject in his work. In his own words:

“I am interested in the increasing industrialisation of our countryside. By portraying the familiar landscape then overlaying an implied narrative that is ambiguous and possibly disconcerting, but is clearly ‘of our time’, I wish to convey a sense of the impact humans are having on our environment.

In the current series of paintings I am interested in the waterlogged fields of the agricultural landscape, following periods of exceptional and unusual rainfall, as reminiscent of the grainy images of WWI battlefields of northern France and therefore a metaphor for mankind’s impending battle with climate uncertainty. I want to convey the aspects of our ‘green and pleasant’ land with a slight look of the dystopian, and a nod to Paul Nash and other WWI artists. The landscape of the Anthropocene; the landscape ‘of our time’. I work from photographs of flooded fields in Suffolk with deep tracks in the earth gouged out by industrial size farm vehicles, creating dramatic flooded vistas highlighting just how fragile our world is.”

Stephen Read, 2022

Edori Fertig