UNEDITED: Stephen Price (1995) was born and raised in Italy for 19 years after his parents emigrated from Ghana. In 2014 he moved with his family to Birmingham (UK) where he discovered his interest for Art. From that moment he decided to study Art & Design in College then graduated in 2020 at the University of Northampton in BA Fine Art Painting and Drawing.

His rich humanistic portraits are textural yet delicate, layered with a concoction of marks and surfaces that appeal on both an emotional and visual level. Price uses his imagination along with photographic source material from the internet to develop nonexistent figures that inhabit their own timeless worlds. Price’s work reflects on his black identity using materials such as charcoal to celebrate the beauty of blackness, as well as atmospheric colour to ground these nameless and faceless figures in nature.

The works’ seductive velvety charcoal areas sit in harmony with more gestural, glossy areas of bright acrylic paint that punctuate and surround his figures. Price is particularly concerned with colour and its emotive power in relation to the landscapes his figures inhabit – the worlds he creates are informed by both psychological and music along with art historical research. When rendering each figure, Price uses gesture to create a haziness that simultaneously highlights and obscures the artist and figure’s own feeling and emotion, allowing his colour palette to take centre stage. These built up layers of charcoal are peppered with windows to the surfaces and tones below, giving the work a tenderness which sits in contrast to Price’s slightly rudimentary, loose approach. Deviating from the physical image by combining his imagination and memory, Price create works that have an ambiguous smokiness that distills the figure down to their feelings.