Arts

Stuart grew up overseas. His father worked for USAID and UNESCO, and the family lived in Libya, Liberia, Nigeria, Samoa, Nepal and the Philippines, where he attended the same school as Ferdinand Marcos. Exposure to diverse cultures enriched his appreciation of art. “Not long after a year spent in Samoa, I came face-to-face with Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings and felt that he’d captured some essence, some emotional truth about Polynesia. It wasn’t plein-air painting or photo-realism; it got to something more real, more poetic, more about the whole environment of that culture and place. It was a revelation to me about what art could do.” Stuart’s mother, an artist, made sure art materials were readily available throughout his youth and encouraged him to attend the highly regarded Boston University College of Fine Arts, which boasts a traditional drawing-based curriculum, a solid grounding for any artist.

Stuart began painting representationally, but, in the end, he couldn’t resist the lure of the nonobjective. “It required a leap of faith for me, to try my own non-representational paintings,” he says, “and, after a long, hesitant period of attempts, I finally ... made a committed breach with my past landscape and still-life work, and adventured into a new mode of painting that feels truer to myself.”

He’d always been drawn to the minimalist, formal simplicity of the Japanese aesthetic, and a visit to Japan in 1996—where he toured the Zen temples in Kyoto, including Ryoan-ji, with its raked gravel rock garden—sparked his transformation. Returning home, he had “a rare, clear dream of a large abstract painting. It was so vivid and convincing that I quickly set out to do the work. This was the beginning of my ‘adventure’—the trigger that started me working on what I’d only thought about for a long time.”

Beverly Reynolds, of the Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, who represents Stuart (prices range from $1,500 to $8,500), says, “His work has evolved in a very natural way, and there is an elegance and grace about his paintings. It is as if light comes from within his paintings, and the way that he applies the paint is technical and also intuitive.”