Telfer Stokes: Reminiscence - New York Paintings and Metal Objects

TELFER STOKES

TELFER STOKES Reminiscence: New York Paintings and Metal Objects

Interview with Adrian Dannatt October 2018

‘Telfer Stokes’ is so ripely resonant a name, with the faintest hint of the fictional, the quote marks – and happily the man himself more than lives up to it, a fabled figure of so rich a provenance and fecund an artistic heritage, an oeuvre of manifold creativity in every medium and mode, as to straddle the cultural history of the last two centuries like some Zelig who has been everywhere and known everyone.

remarried the sister of his first wife, and she, too, became a much-loved ceramicist and successful potter.

If there is any ‘anxiety of influence’ (to use the phrase of the literary critic Harold Bloom) in all this, there is also the reassurance of a certain lineage and the open acceptance of change. For, much as Telfer’s work has shifted between genres, including everything from neon installations to handmade artist books, he has never been afraid of new self-discovery.

Born in 1940 into the hautest of high bohemia, his mother was the artist Margaret Mellis and his father the art historian, psychoanalytic expert and latter-day painter Adrian Stokes, whose own father, the equally excellently named Durham Stokes, was a celebrated stockbroker whose largesse surely helped support these most cultivated of existences.

After all, his father Adrian only began to paint at the end of his analysis with Melanie Klein in 1935, when he was already 33 years old; Margaret Mellis started becoming successful when she started making her driftwood constructions in 1980 at the age of 66 years; and Ann Stokes began her ceramics already aged 35.

Stokes grew up in St Ives, surrounded by practically the whole of the modernist movement in exile, and then after Bryanston School and the Slade School of Art won the prestigious Beckmann Fellowship (as in Max) to the Brooklyn Museum Art School and moved to New York at the tender age of 21. As such, he was a pioneer amongst English artists in that city, indeed a bold precursor to the entire ‘British Invasion’, even before the Beatles and the Stones, who only arrived in 1964 – by which time Stokes was safely back in Britain.

Thus at a notably strong 78, Telfer himself – living an ideal life in the Southwold house where his mother and stepfather created some of their finest work – is perfectly braced for whatever new inspiration may arrive, perhaps some entirely fresh departure. But first he must descend for his morning swim, heading out into the freezing waters with all the strength and knowledge of the life well lived so long.

Adrian Dannatt; It must have been rather marvellous growing up in the high bohemia of St Ives in the 1940s, back when it really was an artist’s colony.

With a lucky knack for meeting the right people in the right places, Stokes befriended not only Barnett Newman and Malcolm Morley but also the whole gamut of the most experimental and established of British artists over the last fifty years, not to mention the fact that he lived in Los Angeles with one of the most celebrated if not notorious of conceptual art stars, the late Jack Goldstein.

Telfer Stokes; I very much made my own kind of world in St Ives. I lived in my own fantasy. Janie, who was 19 or so, would come over to look after me as Margaret, my mother, needed time to paint. Janie was one of ten children in a two-room, two-floor house, amazingly, all of them, including the parents, living together. There’s a photograph of me on one of the father’s knees and the newborn on his other knee, with at least eight more children all ranging in different ages, behind. There was also someone called Farrell, he’d been inherited when my father bought the house. He was basically the gardener who’d built himself a shed (the garden was large and included a field), and when the previous owners sold the house he was part of the sale, including the shed.

There are artists everywhere in Telfer’s world, not least his stepfather, the painter and collagist Francis Davison, whom his mother had married in 1948 when he was eight, and whose reclusive nature and most discrete of careers was perhaps a perverse inspiration for Telfer’s own avoidance of the limelight.

There was also, complicatedly, his stepmother, Ann, who was also his aunt, for Adrian Stokes had infamously

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Technically, he was the gardener but he never seemed to do very much. He had this wonderful shed where I would go and draw. “Go and see Farrell,” my parents would say, and so I would go there to draw. In fact, Margaret put on a show of my drawings when I was four, my first one-man show was in St Ives at the age of four!

I was going to play. Music became the focal point, and everything related to it. This was just the beginning, as ever since then I’ve always played music. When I work, I play music.

AD; And there were so many other artists there at the time, like Gabo and Nicholson…

TS; Well I did play a bit. In the past, I played a harmonica.

Actually, I used to play a rubber band on the kitchen table at the Mill in Scotland, which had a special vibration, a rubber band stretched between two drawer knobs

AD; And have you played music yourself ?

TS; I would be sent up to Farrell when Ben Nicholson and the others came round. They all used to spend a lot of time playing croquet on the lawn. Nina Gabo was one of my closest friends, all my friends were girls. I would have tea with them on a regular basis, one day after another.

But I would see quite a lot of Naum Gabo. He was there, working away at Fairy Deans, which was literally the first house you came to at the end of our driveway. Our drive was a sort of short cut to get to St Ives, so quite a number of artists, including Gabo, would just stroll through our drive. A lot happened in my life early on, and it has stayed with me. I was six when we left.

AD; Drunk?

TS; I could have been drunk.

AD; Your current metal objects look as if one could bang them to make music.

TS; I have never made sound art, if you want to call it that. I suppose one could play metal sculptures – it’s very different. I remember when I was in Russia once, in the Yeltsin period, there were some artists who were making sculpture and then making music with them. It felt quite normal. In fact, I probably have clashed bits of metal together and even thrown them around.

AD; You already had a highly developed artistic temperament of your own…

TS; It goes right back to when I was very young, there was a point when I knew there were complications, difficulties in relation to my parents. I had my own obsessions, even aged five in St Ives. Between our house and the sea, there was a railway that went in the direction of Penzance, back and forth. I used to hear it and had this absolute obsession. Mostly it was the sound: I never actually saw the train. One would think I would have gone down to look but I was not that interested in seeing it. I’d established an interest in the sound, the noise, and imagining what it was. I knew I would be disappointed if I really saw this shunting train. There was a lot of shunting in St Ives, and the noise of the train on the rails connected up with my only other absolute obsession, music. All my experiences early on were auditory, about sound. We had an HMV system with a great big horn. You had to cut these cedar needles at an angle with a special pair of scissors to play the record. I was allowed to play the 78s (this was before I could even read), to choose what

AD; So your parents approved of the idea of you, too, becoming an artist?

TS; They probably couldn’t have imagined it otherwise, but interestingly none of my own children are artists. I was going to be an artist. It was taken for granted, not by anyone else but by myself. I went straight to the Slade. I didn’t choose it ­– this was definitely an inside job – my father knew Bill Coldstream. Both my parents had been at the Euston Road School together in the 1930s, and, in fact, held their wedding celebration there. Bill was a very old friend.

AD; Did Coldstream himself teach you?

TS; No, I was taught drawing by Patrick George. I remember vividly Claude Rogers sitting down on the donkey in the life room and doing a very good drawing

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Barnett Newman and Telfer Stokes at Newman’s studio, 1963

of the model on my piece of paper – that did teach me a lot, but I hadn’t really been doing Slade traditional figure painting. I recently came across a copy of a Rembrandt self-portrait that I’d completely forgotten I’d done. The end project of a Slade painting class, going to copy at the National Gallery, and I chose to do this Rembrandt selfportrait of him looking sideways on with his little hat. I did get something from that, how things were placed. I did sculpture as well, I made plaster figures, torsos really.

In fact, I was more interested in the ‘torsoness’ of the torso than in the actual figure. I liked the sense of it being cut off. This was my compromise at art college, finding some other way of doing it. I was in the sculpture department quite a lot. Reg Butler was there. To tell the truth, I was slightly aloof.

AD; And in the interim you had famously moved to New York?

TS; I went there as soon as I could after I left the Slade.

I arrived in September 1962 on the SS United States, an appalling so-called cruise ship, a converted army carrier for troops, really. I was below the water line, and it was horrific, six bunks and one lavatory. If it had been rough, it would have been terrible; it made one sick just to look at it. But I do remember something absolutely unique. We arrived at the sound outside New York (for all I knew it was still the middle of the Atlantic). They got us up at four in the morning, and in the distance we could see a sort of glow, the sun just catching the top of the skyscrapers. As we came in all morning, the whole thing revealed itself, basically a symmetrical castle, the sun hitting the top of skyscrapers, gradually red, then yellow and blue and shadow. We spent the whole rest of the morning watching this, transfixed. As we came in, these buildings started to reveal themselves as positioned at different levels, some in front, some behind. They all looked symmetrical originally. It was a four-hour job. I’ve never forgotten that.

You’d never get that on an airplane. It was an exercise in looking, just arriving in New York – which set the whole thing up, an astonishing, exceptional experience. Taken as a whole, the biggest man-made object in the world.

AD; Were there other celebrated students?

TS; Well in my year, there was Patrick Procktor, and to see him over six foot six sitting on the donkey drawing (a donkey is very low on the ground and you straddle it), it was very strange and didn’t seem right. The Slade wasn’t ‘Pop’ like the Royal College at that time, it was still very Bomberg. It felt incredibly old fashioned, everyone was painting Bomberg. I didn’t really enjoy the Slade very much. My tutor was Sam Carter, who taught perspective. He didn’t have anything to say about what I did at all. It was a complete failure. Sam asked me: “Why Telfer, why do you paint?” I said straight back to him: ‘Cos it’s what yer do…’ When my father heard about this, he thought it was absolutely hilarious. He kept on playing it back to me: “Cos it’s what YER DO!”

AD; The lure of the new American art must have been so strong back then?

TS; All I really wanted to do was go to New York.

Before the Slade, I had come across Life magazine with a big spread from Jackson Pollock right through all the Abstract Expressionists, an enormous spread of images of their work. This was quite seminal, the first time I was introduced to what was going on in America. I didn’t even know there was an art scene in America then. Back in London I had a studio in Whitechapel and so went to all the shows there – the Bryan Robertson exhibitions, the Pollock and, of course, the Rothko. I was even in the TV film they made about the Rothko show at the time.

And then the big revelation at the Whitechapel was the Rauschenberg followed by the Johns.

AD; So art school was altogether less of a success…

TS; What I learnt at the Slade was actually how to make money. You buy a house for so many hundred pounds in Islington on the Grand Union Canal, maybe it has a couple of sitting tenants and you bring in students like myself to knock out and replace the sash windows, and eventually with all the intrusion, the people had a tendency to move out and the owner would then sell it for a few more hundred pounds and move on to the next building. I didn’t buy my own house in Kentish Town until 1968, so nearly too late, before the boom.

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AD; You had won a scholarship, set up by Max Beckmann, to study in New York?

AD; And you were also sharing the space with the young Malcolm Morley, who funnily enough had also spent time in St Ives as an artist?

TS; I’d gone to the basement of the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square and found a UNESCO book of scholarships abroad. I looked through this enormous volume of scholarships and applied for every college in the whole of New York, any which had the words ‘New York’. I didn’t know there was something called ‘New York State’; I just assumed it was all in the city. This is not a very complimentary story, as I only got one reply – from the Brooklyn Museum Art College – from some fifteen I sent out. No replies from anyone else!

TS; When I first arrived, I was sleeping on Bob Cox’s couch, the loft was divided in half and Malcolm was working in the other bit. They would meet at weekends and argue about who was going to buy out who. Malcolm wanted someone to buy all his crap, absolute rubbish, there was nothing in there. They actually started fighting on the landing and I would just watch. In the end, I just put myself forward: ‘If you want me to pay for your bits and pieces, Malcolm, I’ll do it.” He first pretended not to notice and then took it on board and moved out.

AD; The art school was next to the Brooklyn Museum itself ?

AD; So you got off Cox’s couch and took over Morley’s half of the loft?

TS; Yes, it was attached to the museum. I went on the first day and thought ‘Oh God’. Because at this point I was already staying with a friend on Henry Street in downtown Manhattan, and really wanted to be there instead. My friend was a fellow artist, Robert ‘Bob’ Cox, whom I knew from school. He had a loft at 142 Henry Street. He was up on the eighth floor. With all these garments being made on every other floor below, you heard this whirr of sewing machines going all the time, an amazing noise on every single floor. It was lovely, going up in the lift, you went through all these levels of activity and noise. The eighth floor was only for rent because the heating never really reached up there. It was left empty. They were grateful these crazy artists wanted to live there – I shouldn’t say ‘live’, because it was illegal then. You had to be very careful with the fire department, who made regular inspections. I was once caught with a load of sheets going down to the Laundromat. They made me turn around and go back and inspected my loft.

I’d actually made a sort of trap, a small hidden bedroom, which you shut the door on when you opened another entrance on the painting wall diagonally across the room.

This loft had windows on three sides, looking out over Manhattan Bridge and the other way up town, the Empire State, and from the roof one could see the whole of Wall Street. Now it is part of Chinatown, just above the spire of the Catholic church, the building is still there.

TS; That’s actually how I met Barnett Newman. Not long after Malcom left, there was a knock on the door, and I looked through the spy hole and saw what looked like a walrus, to be honest, with his big moustache. So I opened the door and Barney just walked through and said: ‘Where’s Malcolm?’ Then he said: ‘Oh not another limey!’ But we really became great friends. He would take me places he thought I should go to for paint, to prepare the canvases, get the materials. This was all down in the city, commercial paint, the old stores, not the art stores.

He hated all ‘artist materials’ shops. Bob and I would see him at least once a week. We would go to his place, his studio was down near Wall Street, or he’d come to us. He said it reminded him of when he and Adolph Gottlieb were our age; I was 21 going on 22.

AD; There weren’t so many British artists in New York at that time?

TS; Dick Smith had been there but by then he had returned to England, so I met with him afterwards in London and saw his show at Kasmin. I used to know Kasmin, curiously, when he put on a John Latham show at the Chelsea Hotel. I remember going to the opening there of Latham, and that was when I first met him. After the tussle with Malcolm, that was the last I saw of him.

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There really weren’t many British artists in New York that I knew of at the time.

what he was doing was painting one layer of paint on top of another, and at a particular moment he would leave a bit, which formed the actual stripe or zip. It was just about layering. I don’t know how many layers he put on but he never made his mind up until a long time after he’d put down these layers. What I started doing was considering painting something completely as one colour and then painting possibly a slightly different colour on top, and the result would be a combination of those two, the top colour would influence, but wouldn’t obliterate the under colour completely, it would be changed because of what lay underneath.

AD; The year you arrived, 1962, was the annus mirabilis of American ‘Pop Art’ – was that something which touched you at all?

TS; Well, I was aware of Johns and Rauschenberg, through Barney who knew them well, and I went to Castelli uptown to see what was going on up there. This was long before there were any galleries downtown.

Through our connection to Barney, we would go to all these openings. I remember Bob being at a party uptown.

He rang, saying I must come up to this party. He said: ‘There’s this French guy up here, this artist called Marcel Duchamp.’ I said: ‘Who’s that?’ I didn’t know who he was but I did go. I hate to be thought of as namedropping but there was Duchamp and he gave me this big wink, amazing. We were overlooking Central Park, and I think he must have been working on Étant Donées, as he was obsessively talking about the number of rapes and murders that had been happening in Central Park, which must have related in all sorts of ways to that.

AD; What did Newman say about your own work?

TS; Barnett was very kind: when I was leaving, he came round with some people to help roll up the paintings and fit them into cardboard tubes. He had this idea that if I was going back on a boat, everything would have to be watertight. He wanted to roll up all the canvases I’d done and encase them in an inner and an outer tube.

Barney had this idea that if you were stored in the hold of a boat, it would be swimming with water, so he literally wanted to make everything watertight. I kept on saying I don’t know if it really was like that on a ship, but he was very insistent. It was absolutely thanks to Barnett’s system, his obsessive thoroughness, that these paintings survived. I still have them – unlike so much of my other work, which I have mislaid – so, in a way, this current Redfern show is all thanks to Barnett Newman back in 1963!

AD; Did Barnett Newman know of your father Adrian Stokes as a critic?

TS; Yes, Barney did know about Adrian later on. I don’t know how. And at the same time, Adrian wanted me to go and see Lincoln Kirstien, this kind of Diaghilev figure (Adrian had written reviews of the Diaghilev ballet and had written two books on ballet). It was very embarrassing. You were met by this servant, walked down a long corridor of naked boxers with their gloves in front of their balls, and he sat at the end waiting for you on a throne like a King – or Queen. But then we went together to the New York City Ballet, and it was wonderful, beautiful, with Balanchine choreography.

AD; So you made it safely back to Blighty?

TS; I had a wonderful trip back on the SS La France. It was magical, a party every night. Back then, it was the same cost to fly as to take the boat. We had four nights of absolute heaven.

AD; Had America changed your approach to making art?

AD; And what did you make of Barnett Newman’s paintings back then?

TS; In New York, I had become keen on working hard at home, staying back just to keep working. Helen just recently found a drawing book dated December 22-28, 1962, and I was obviously making the point that while others were out enjoying their turkeys, I was happily

TS; It was a revelation. I’d seen photographs and they gave no indication of how the work was made. He was known for these stripes along the edge of the canvas. In actual fact

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sitting on my own, entirely alone, just doing drawing.

It was very awkward at the Slade, and I was much happier when I was in New York, happy to be completely taken out of myself and to be influenced. The scale was so completely different. America is such a big country, and it made you think very differently to being in England.

Painting is a spatial thing. It’s a physical thing. When I got back to London, I did try to recreate what I felt I was dealing with and it came out very differently indeed.

I was influenced by the situation, literally the place had its influence on what you were doing. You couldn’t recreate that back in London, it was specific to New York, downtown Manhattan.

wrong with it, then I remembered that the guy who’d photographed it back in the 1960s always insisted on photographing every painting upside down. He thought they looked better, for some reason, the light hit them better or something.

AD; When back from New York you started teaching at Reading…

TS; I taught drawing there. Rita Donagh was running the drawing course and brought me in because she liked what I was doing. She was really very kind, she wanted me to help her in her drawing class. There was also Roger Cook, who I’d been at the Slade with, also now teaching, because Claude Rogers had moved from the Slade to Reading and offered us all jobs. Later I moved to teach at Corsham, drawing and then painting. Howard [Hodgkin] was there, and I would travel down on the train on the same day as Michael Kidner. We would have really fantastic conversations. I really enjoyed talking with him.

There were some impressive students, including Martin Atwood, who became a good friend. He was just a few years younger and moved into the house in Kentish Town, living upstairs with some of his friends from Corsham, so I kept a connection with those I taught. The tragedy of Martin was that he killed himself, a terrible event. He was important, as there is a lot of history between us. I met Helen Douglas through him. I’d already produced three books, and then Helen and I moved to Scotland together and collaborated making books until the mid nineties.

AD; And have the paintings been hidden in their Barnett Newman tubes all this time?

TS; I did actually show some of the paintings after I had come back, at the New Art Centre, run by Madeleine Ponsonby.

AD; Presumably your father came to see them. Was he shocked?

TS; Well, they were somewhat alien to my father’s aesthetic but not completely. He had very much been taken by Bridget Riley’s paintings, and some of her first works at the Tate were acquired through him. In fact, my father said: ‘You must keep these, you will show them some day.’ He proved to be absolutely right, which is really rather astonishing.

AD; But before that you’d had a major solo show at the Serpentine Gallery.

AD; And now here they are at the Redfern, 55 years later…

TS; My painting had started to change. I did these spraygun paintings with a scallop-curvy edge on both sides, showing blank canvas. I then started to physically make a series of troughs that related to this scallop edge, but three dimensionally. I would drape the canvas into these troughs, as a way of flooding or staining the canvas. The construction of these objects, these troughs, led to making sculptural works in fiberglass. My show at the Serpentine (which was a shared exhibition; I had one room) was given to me because I’d shown some of these paintings done in a trough and which led to making the fiberglass

TS; I must be clear that the reason I’m showing at the Redfern is because the gallery would come and visit to see my store of art works by my mother, Margaret Mellis, and my stepfather, Francis Davison. This was next door to where I work myself, and they wanted to know what I was doing before my current metal sculptures and before I spent thirty years in Scotland making books.,I explained I had been painting, and I managed to find one image of an early work. Amazingly, this one painting had been photographed upside down. I knew there was something

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pieces. None of that has survived at all. It was bulky and there was nowhere to put it – though I did sell one piece.

It was an optimistic kind of thing to do. I had never actually worked with fiberglass. I had to find my way with it while doing the show.

TS; As it happened, the first book I ever published, ‘Passage’, was reviewed by Clive Phillpot in Studio International. He was then librarian at Chelsea School of Art, and he moved to MoMA as the librarian and proposed me for that book project at MoMA.

AD; And then came a big, dramatic break, this was an end to painting and sculpting for some 35 years?

AD; I wondered if you knew your exact contemporaries in that ‘Bookworks’ show, artists also born in 1940, the same year as you, such as Mel Bochner, Vito Acconci, Henry Flynt and Lawrence Weiner?

TS; Well, not a completely deliberate break. My Serpentine show was in June 1971 and I’d produced my first book by April 1972. That summer, I went away and started to work on making a book. I also went to Saunton Sands in Devon, down by the sea, and was making things with expanded polystyrene. You would mix these two chemicals and it went into a foam, you could also do this with sand. I did these kind of objects at the same time as working on my first book, but those all disappeared.

Naturally, there is a lot of other work that never had any sort of exhibition and just went by the wayside.

TS; Yes, I met Acconci through Goldstein when I was staying with him back in Brooklyn, and I knew that Laurence Weiner was also very much admired by Jack.

AD; One of your key books ‘Young Masters and Misses’ of 1984 was not only published by MoMA but sponsored

by Agnes Gund, that museum’s most famous trustee – real Manhattan art-world royalty!

TS; Back then, I was doing a book a year and I was going to New York regularly every year, our distributors were Printed Matter. There was nothing much happening in London at that time – there was Nigel Greenwood and that was about it. In America, there were lots of small presses. There were many artist residencies, which had presses – you spent a month making a book, which was printed by the time that you left.

AD; The book works seem very much part of that anticommercial, conceptual resistance to commodification so typical of the early 1970s.

TS; It was anti-commercial but also about reconnection, that everything I really need to say is here on this kitchen table. The formal aspects of how to make a book made it possible for me to pick up a camera, which I hadn’t done before and start recording what was happening. That lead to another stage where I stated making metal objects. I started making books almost immediately after my show at the Serpentine. The people I looked at were Dieter Rot, who had been published by Hansjorg Mayer (who had also been at Corsham), and Ed Ruscha in LA. I felt there was a place for me with ‘book form’, and I was anxious to get going and start making books as quickly as possible. I went out to LA after I published my first book, ‘Passage’ and spoke to Ed in the summer of 1972. Living in LA, I saw a lot of Jack Goldstein, and he introduced me in turn to Bill Wegman and others.

AD; Just this year you had a full retrospective at Printed Matter in New York of the book works you made with Helen Douglas as Weproductions – run out of your home in Scotland – an impressive range of varied publications.

TS; When I first started making books, I initially took them to a printer but by the time we moved to Scotland there were a lots of available printing presses going for scrap and I was just paying to transport them to where we lived. I never knew how to print, I’d never done it before, I had to learn. This perhaps relates to how I would move from making paintings to publishing books and now sculpture. It was really a need to reconnect with what was going on around. Sometimes you can become more and more removed from in the world you are living in. I have made very definite attempts in my life to reconnect to

AD; You had no less than four works included in that seminal MoMA show ‘Bookworks’ back in 1977, no small achievement…

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what’s going on around. You don’t want to go on putting forward that same foot every time. There is another part, maybe, that you can to put forward, an arm instead of a foot.

AD; This is such a rich lineage of creativity, from your New York paintings through fibreglass and neon installations to artist book works and now your metal sculptures…

AD; But was there a deliberate break between these books and your current metal assemblages?

TS; You’re taking something and not having to translate it literally. To go back to the idea of my train in St Ives, it’s really about what you heard and imagined was enough.

You can’t actually describe it; maybe being an artist is making something that you can’t describe. It is, in the end, just the need to reconnect to the detritus of the world and find another purpose for it. The artist is here to cast around and try to find these new connections to life.

TS; Yes, it was a conscious shift to the metal constructions. I was already in Lowestoft and made a couple of books, collaborations which were never published. But there was a workshop next to me called ‘A1 Ironworks’ and they had a skip into which they would throw tons of metal. I would go through all this, and eventually I discovered the scrap yard they were sending the metal to, an incredible reservoir of used bits of metal, in Yarmouth. I would go there every week and get stuff, and it was just inevitable that I would start using it. You have reclamation yards for wood but for metal it’s very different. These ex-industrial and ex-marine things are there to be broken up. With metal, there is this need for an actual area where this solid machinery is broken up so it can be shipped out for scrap, and sometimes they want it down to very small elements. Back when you could get into these yards – which is now impossible to do – there was a real range, variety, something that could be used.

Ends

AD; Did you feel you were in any way paralleling your mother’s work when she gathered driftwood along the beaches and brought it all home with her?

TS; No, I didn’t think that, as I was already looking after her and she wasn’t making anything by that time.

I was attracted to the metal, I think I always have been, and sometimes the very bright commercial colours also attracted me. Really, it felt like another connection to what was going on around. There was a thrill in reconnecting and the excitement of being able to use these new tools differently. I had got completely fed up with working on a computer. When I began publishing books, I was doing it myself manually, the paste up and layout, flip flopping from positive to negative and back on film in the darkroom. By the time I finished, it was all computer and photoshop and that was the death of it.

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PAINTINGS

T O F I N A L S I T U AT I O N , 1 9 6 3 oil on canvas 212 × 182 cm

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UNTITLED, 1963 oil on canvas 212 × 152 cm

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UNTITLED, 1963 oil on canvas 212 × 152 cm

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UNTITLED, 1963 oil on canvas 212 × 152 cm

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FOR A PRIZE, 1968 oil on canvas 175 × 152 cm

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UNTITLED, 1968 oil on canvas 172 × 212 cm

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T I G H T S E T, 1 9 6 8 oil on canvas 173 × 212 cm

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M E TA L O B J E C T S

F L A R E , 2 017 welded steel 76 × 79 × 15 cm

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L R B , 2 018 welded steel 98 × 45 × 8.5 cm

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M A R I S H , 2 017 welded steel 33 × 78 × 5 cm

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LINCH PIN, 2014 welded steel 55 × 107 × 3 cm

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F I L I G R E E , 2 016 welded steel 60 × 77 × 3.5 cm

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B E I N G T H E R E , 2 016 welded steel 40 × 72 × 6 cm

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F E N E S T R A , 2 016 welded steel 60 × 46 × 13 cm

CRUX, 2014 welded steel 65 × 60 × 60 cm

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ARMOREL, 2013 welded steel 63 × 51 × 12 cm

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SNEISHKA, 2014 welded steel 31 × 22 × 11 cm

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R E M I N I S C E N C E , 2 018 welded steel 38 × 37 × 7 cm

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T C H O T C H K E S , 2 018 welded steel 17 × 25 × 6 cm

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A P E R C U S , 2 018 welded steel 23 × 23 × 3 cm

C H E L O O , 2 018 welded steel 40 × 53 × 8 cm

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K V E T C H , 2 012 welded steel 67 × 27 × 10 cm

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BIOGRAPHY 1940 Born St Ives, Cornwall.

Published to coincide with the exhibition

Studied at the Slade, and had a Beckmann Fellowship to do a postgraduate at Brooklyn Museum Art School, New York in 1962.

TELFER STOKES Reminiscence: New York Paintings and Metal Objects

Founded imprint WEPRODUCTIONS (Artist Books) in collaboration with Helen Douglas.

Started to make Sculptural objects, exhibited at Kettles Yard Open 2008.

North House Gallery 2010 & 2013.

Austin/Desmond Fine Art 2015.

WITH THANKS TO Richard Selby, The Redfern Gallery Adrian Dannatt, Interview Douglas Atfield, Photography Graham Rees, Layout James Birch Catriona Colledge Becky Ladenburg Emily FitzRoy

The Redfern Gallery 20 Cork Street, London W1S 3HL +44 (0)20 7734 1732 redfern-gallery.com

at The Redfern Gallery 21 November – 4 December 2018 Published by The Redfern Gallery, London 2018 ISBN: 978-0-948460-75-3 All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying recording or any other information storage or retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the gallery.

Inside Front Cover: Photograph by John Cook Page 12: Photograph by James Scott