Harvey Stapleton weaves together memory, observation, and imagination through painting, writing, and drawing. His works hold shifting inner worlds where experience stretches, fades, and collides – transforming into environments that feel both intensely personal and strangely autonomous, as if the paintings are making meaning beyond the moment that first produced them.
Through thick application of oil paint, Harvey repeatedly marks and removes layers of surface, allowing texture and atmosphere to build over time. This process produces dense, tactile paintings with a sensory charge—details emerge and disappear as the surface obscures and reveals, creating a sense of strangeness and quiet intensity within the image.
In this new series of paintings Harvey invites us to journey across landscapes of abandonment. We roam past industrial ruins, under heavy skies and through dense forests. We are invited on a journey, continually moving back and forth between representation and abstraction. Traces of peoples lives and works emerge through the intensive mark making, only to become obscured, swallowed up in the dense churning streams of paint.
Harvey graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2025 and we have represented his work since then.
