Paul Stopforth

Paul Stopforth is a painter and graphic artist who deals mostly with images that relate to portraits and human figures. He works in oil, gouache, ink, charcoal, metal and the encaustic processes as well as in lithography.

Stopforth's 1980 series of 20 drawings based on the death of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko are among the great artworks produced in protest to the apartheid regime. Paul Stopforth was one of the first visual artists to confront the injustices of the apartheid system through his work which evidence a particular kind of witnessing and testimony in relation to apartheid-era interrogation and torture, and to the deaths in detention to which these practices led.

Paul Stopforth focuses on areas of the body, or on details of an environment, which at first seem banal but on closer examination reveal much about the subject matter and the artist's own beliefs.

Paul Stopforth has been exhibiting his artwork since 1971 and over the years has participated in many exhibitions in South Africa, Europe and The United States. In 1985 Paul Stopforth was awarded the Rodney Burn Award for Figurative Drawing by the Royal College of Art, UK. In 1986 he was awarded the Ian Haggie Award for Best Artist, Market Theatre Gallery, Johannesburg.Public collections holding his works include the Harvard Film Archive; the Constitutional Court of South Africa; Tufts University Gallery; the National Gallery, Cape Town; Johannesburg Art Gallery; Durban Art Museum; the Pretoria Art Gallery; and University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries. David Krut Projects in New York represent him.

In 1988 Stopforth and his wife Carol Marshall immigrated to Boston in the United States. At the time, disillusioned by yet another State of Emergency, Stopforth took the opportunity to work at Tufts for a year with the assistance of Kim Berman .

Upon his arrival in the US, he experienced the sudden loss of clearly defined good and evil as a framework for creation and a new prevalence of ambiguity. With the freedom to create what an artist wanted also came the taxing decisions of how to know and decide what to create. Living in the US, Stopforth feels, has allowed him room for explorations and to breathe.

Paul Stopforth currently teaches in the art department at Harvard University, where he has been since 1996. He is a lecturer on Visual and Environmental Studies and is the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Paul Stopforth began working at The Artists' Press on these two prints in 2003; they were completed in 2004 after he had done a residency on Robben Island.

Artists Statement:
Migration Prints:

Double-vision, double-take, double-mind, double-bind, double-faced, double-tongued and double-edged all describe something about the mental somersaulting that accompanies the life of the immigrant and the exile.

These two prints constitute a reflection on living a life with, and between two worlds.'Migration: Double-back' refers to the often nostalgic recollections of the past lived in another country. Switching backward and forward between two histories, two geographies and two autobiographies sometimes exhilarated by the richness of the experience and at other times filled with longing for what is no longer "home."

'Migration: Double-grind' uses a British Boer War grindstone as an image that reflects the tension and the struggle of coming to terms with life in another culture, in another country.

The courage and the perseverance required are invigorating, and hopefully a new and more precise awareness of what it means to be in the world is the result.

The superimposition of the translucent images of 'Lifeboy' and 'Sunlight ' soap refer directly to Stopforth's childhood and for him they constitute triggers of memory.

"You learn, if you're lucky, the chameleon art of adaptation, and how to modulate your laughter. You learn to use your lips properly. Henceforth you are at home nowhere, and by that token everywhere.'

Breyten Breytenbach, ' The Exile as African.'
Paul Stopforth 2004

Artists

New Editions

Robben Island Series (2005)

Migration Series (2003)

Broederstroom Press Lithograph 1989