Tim Stoner: “I knew I was fucked but my answer was to paint”

In the 40 years that Tim Stoner has been painting, a lot has changed. He’s been lucky and unlucky, financially comfortable and not-so-comfortable. He’s dramatically altered his style multiple times. He’s joined and left more than his fair share of galleries and disappeared entirely more than once, sometimes for years at a time. But one thing has stayed the same: he never stopped painting.

A year ago, things weren’t going well for Stoner. Brexit had made his former life as a British expat in Spain untenable, the lease on his home and studio in London had run out and he had no money. “My whole life was falling apart,” he tells me, “I was at the bottom of a very deep hole.” With nowhere to turn, he painted. “I decided that I was just going to focus on doing the best that I could do with what I’m best at.” He wasn’t represented by a gallery but he did it anyway, returning to a now familiar process of building up and stripping down layers of paint on the same canvases that he had been working on for years.

Today, ten of those canvases hang on the wall of Pace in Mayfair, comprising his solo exhibition ‘Negative Space’. Chapped and scratched, they look as much like archeological relics as contemporary paintings. Like ancient artefacts, they seem to hum with a significance handed down to them by the history that they’ve lived through. They are all horizontal in aspect and many look like they might once have been landscapes. Suggestions of blue skies or vague horizon lines are visible here and there. If such images did exist, they have long been excavated. The litany of calligraphic scrawlings that replace them also looks to have been scraped away and reapplied. Their scarred surfaces bear witness to the years that Stoner has spent painting them.

We speak in a smartly furnished back room of the gallery, surrounded by his neatly framed works on paper. It seems like things are looking up. It seems like he’s found some success – at least, that’s how a dealer or collector might look at it. For Stoner, this has nothing to do with success.

“They think there’s this one model of success,” he says. It’s a model that measures success by art market activity, where an artist’s worth is pinned to fickle commercial metrics, not the quality of their work. “Artists need to stop playing that game. They need to say to the art world: ‘Bullshit, we know what we’re doing. You come and have our conversation.’”

Though steadfast in his desire to work on his own terms, Stoner has often found himself on the right side of the art world’s mercurial gatekeepers, and has worked with some of London’s top galleries including The Approach, Alison Jacques and Stuart Shave’s Modern Art. In 2001, he won the Beck’s Futures Award with his smooth-surfaced, eerily indefinite paintings of scenes of leisure and communion. It was then the UK’s largest cash prize for art. With it, he said at the time, he planned to “live life more like my paintings.”

When the competition’s touring exhibition, which started at the ICA, arrived in Scotland, a technician accidentally damaged one of the paintings. Whilst repairing it, Stoner became fascinated by the processes of destruction and restoration. He started sanding and slashing his own canvases, reversing his painting process and unraveling the images. His newfound interest in damage turned out to be a major inflection point for his work – arguably, the paintings in this show are indebted to that clumsy technician – but it can’t have been a thrilling development for his dealer. Just as a market was growing for his now award-winning ethereal figurations, he started destroying them.

“What it made me realise very quickly was that I was on a production line, and I had to get off it,” he explains. Within months, he’d left his gallery. Stoner’s father had worked at a trade union, and he saw how disenfranchised artists are as a workforce. Still today, very few make a steady income from their work. Those that do are often quick to compromise their own creative visions to cater to the market. Under galleries’ demands for consistency, he saw many of his contemporaries stifle their own progression. Determined not to compromise, he did what any good unionist would and withdrew his labour. This would become a theme in his biography. “Every time a gallery decided it didn’t want me to change, I was out of there,” he tells me.

Predictably, the market reacted badly. Even for the most headstrong artist, that was hard to take: “I had to watch my paintings sell for nothing at auction, and I had to watch my legacy disappear,” he says. But it wasn’t enough to interrupt the one constant in his life. “I knew I was fucked but my answer was to go and paint, because that’s all I can do.”

By 2009, Stoner was back on top and planning his next transgression. Having made some money from an exhibition, he decided to leave London for a while. He found a studio in Marbella and filled it with 25 monumental canvases. He spent three years painting them, and then three years breaking the paintings down. “I’d get through thousands of scalpel blades a week, I’d cut my hands open endlessly, I’d accidentally cut through the canvases. I ended up doing things like throwing paintings in swimming pools and using a jet sprayer to blow the paint off.” He imagined his dealer, back in London, head in their hands as they watched him eviscerate years of work. He didn’t care. “What those people do is inconsequential,” he says.

One of those paintings, Persian Red (2009-2024) is part of the Pace exhibition. Portal-like at almost four metres wide, most of its surface is painted in silverish grey and rusty beige and orange forms. Barely visible in the gaps between them are angular shapes in the work’s namesake warm red. They are glimpses at a now-eliminated version of the painting. I wonder what the painting had been before he took a pressure washer to it. Does he miss the old version? “No matter how much I regretted losing some of those paintings, those scraped, damaged, knackered canvases were more interesting in that state than in any state in between.”

The irony of sipping tea in the back office of one of the world’s most powerful galleries whilst telling me that he doesn’t care about the art market isn’t lost on Stoner. “People are going to think I’m a hypocrite; people are going to be very critical of me and they’re right to do so,” he says. Maybe they are right – maybe, after years of dogged commitment to the art over the market, he’s going soft. Maybe he’ll settle into a predictable, market-friendly style that earns him a comfy and consistent income. It’s a possibility. Given his track record, though, it seems very unlikely.

I wouldn’t venture to guess what Stoner will be doing a year from now – how he’ll be doing financially, whether he’ll still be in London, or where he’ll be showing his art. But there’s one thing I know he’ll be doing; the one constant of the last 40 years, which has creatively sustained him throughout his rollercoaster ride with the art world: painting. “I’m a zombie painter,” he says, “If you don’t put a bullet in my head and finish me off, I’m gonna get back up and bite your arm off. I ain’t going nowhere.”