Stephanie Fawbert is a landscape and figurative painter whose work deals with the familiar: people at leisure, days on the beach, families taking a walk. Using photographs as source material, she shifts the focus of the image, opening out meaning and allowing any number of possible narratives to emerge.

She explains: ‘I paint very freely and quickly with the intention that the paint and the way it is applied is a major contributor to the feeling that the image imparts.’ In this way the work is process led. The paintings are built up in thin layers, often transluscent. The colour is vibrant and heightened, the paint runs and drips, contributing to the feeling that these are not real everyday spaces, but more symbolic arenas where different meanings can be unearthed.

There is a longing and nostalgia in the work. The images seem to teeter on a knife edge between cliché and romanticism but then draw back from sentimentality to a more edgy, filmic, even at times, voyeuristic place.

In her paintings, Fawbert is exploring our relationship to nature and to each other. Her work suggests that these relationships are, at times uneasy, but can also be a source of discovery, where her figures seem quietly absorbed, cradled and contained in their environment and each other. With quiet intensity she suggests the potential for wonder.