Stuart Luke Gatherer – The drunken butler

Gatherer was born in England to Scottish and Dutch parents. He grew up in the Eastern Highlands of Scotland, and attended Edinburgh college of art, where he graduated with an MA in fine arts. Gatherer has exhibited nationally and internationally and has had a number of solo shows in London, New York and Scotland. His work is held in private and public collections around the world.

“Gatherer is doing what gifted artists have always done. He does not imitate the past; he searches the past for ways of expressing his own sense of the present. It is as valid to compare his work with videos by Sam Taylor-Wood, often showing young urban professionals of the same sort, as it is to compare it to that of the great painters of the past whom he evokes in some of his compositions. We need both points of reference to understand what he is trying to achieve. Neither comparison detracts from the impressive nature of his achievement.”
Edward Lucie Smith, Art Historian and Critic

Gatherer has stated that ‘Above all I want the paintings to show my continuing obsession with paint as substance. Each work is built up in numerous layers, thick and thin, transparent and opaque- every layer building on the previous and informing the next. It is the sheer physicality and brute practicality of pigment on a flat surface that entrances me far more than mere reportage’.