Harvey Stapleton weaves together memory, observation, and imagining 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.
This body of work grew from a two-month period of drawing and writing in response to the tangled streets, courtyards and gardens of Florence, later expanding into painted worlds upon his return. Harvey is a recent Edinburgh College of Art graduate and a recipient of the RSA John Kinross Scholarship.
