Education

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His primary subject matter is social relations. Stone spent six years squatting as part of the Peckham-based artists collective !WOWOW!.

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!WOWOW! was founded in 2003 in the back room of the Joiners Arms pub in South London. Matthew Stone and Hanna Hanra, both Camberwell students, envisioned their creation as a small, performance art night. In less than a year it spanned four floors in an abandoned department store known as the Co-operative and !WOWOW! had evolved into a catch-all creative network, art collective, with the Co-op functioning as a physical nexus for studios, residencies, exhibitions, and warehouse parties. (Tsjeng, 2013)

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On the one hand, he feels no need to oppose the traditions of art production, seeing its grounding history as a positive; on the other, he sees no reason to deny the digital print on linen as his natural medium – so that when the logic of the work’s production no longer demanded final hand-painted elements, he wasn’t inclined to maintain them just to conform to the norms of what is most readily categorised as a painting. He pushes against the distinction between art and non-art, but now does so within the fine art context of painting. Stone’s work concentrates on how people relate to each other in groups, or to themselves, rather than how they relate to material culture. (Kent, 2017)

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Digital Art

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“I have worked as an artist since I graduated from a Painting degree at Camberwell College of Arts in 2004 in one way or another. I was making traditional oil paintings while I studied, but shifted my work about a month before I graduated and started shooting digital photos of my friends in classical poses and draped all over each other. I used Photoshop a lot to composite them all together there. I’d been using Photoshop since I was about 15 though and learnt Rhino when I was 16. I returned to 3D software around 2014 and developed my signature figurative painterly 3D style from there onwards.” (Stone, 2021)

Inspiration

“I always wanted to make religious paintings and was obsessed with Caravaggio’s treatment of the body and his sense of lighting. I am still referencing that sense of embodied drama and chiaroscuro (his use of strong contrasts between light and dark) in my work. I used to be obsessed with Warhol’s factory and the way he presented a scene of charismatic and creative people as a cultural event and living artwork. Some of this energy of playful creative community informs the way I create some of the group portraits I paint.” (Stone, 2021)