Stephen Hall: Painter

Stephen Hall grew up in Scotland, but as a young man, he went off to see the world. As he explains, “When I was a child, I had tuberculosis. And then I had asthma. And I was led to believe I was a fragile individual who might not have a long life. As soon as I was old enough, I packed my bags, and I went from Aberdeen to New Delhi, India, overland. I traveled all over North Africa and the Middle East. I left to see the world before I passed away. And now I’m 68 years old.” Hall landed in New York in the late seventies. He painted, made jewelry, worked on music videos, did artwork for film, and illustrated book covers. Eventually he was able to paint full time, and has enjoyed a thriving career as a painter. His artwork has sold worldwide, and is held in private and corporate collections. Hall lives at Westbeth with his wife Samantha (Sam) Hall and their daughter Reef. For some years now, Sam has devoted her marketing talents to the “family business.”

Terry Stoller spoke with Stephen Hall in August 2022 about his profitable relationship with an art dealer from Japan in the 1990s; his work in various fields, including jewelry making and book illustration; his paintings that range from early abstraction to works that respond to the crises in the contemporary world; his compositional process; and the business of art.

Terry Stoller: You tell the story of a Japanese art dealer who gave you three years to “become an artist,” during which time he would buy everything you created. What did it mean to “become an artist”?

Stephen Hall: I was working all the time. I was following my own path. What he made me do was paint every day. Originally, he came to my studio in Dumbo. I had maybe made three paintings that year. Other years I made more, but I was drinking a lot. I was bartending. I had a collection of artwork from the past few years. So this is what happened. There had been phone calls back and forth, and I was told that this was an important dealer coming to see you, and when he comes to see you, give him a good deal. So he and a translator came to my studio. He sat down in the middle of the floor, smoking a cigarette, and he pointed at a small painting and said, How much for one? I said, Five hundred dollars. He took ten of them and gave me $5,000 cash. Then he said, How long does it take you to do a thing? Like I said, I had made three paintings that year, but I answered, Three days. He went, OK, I’ll be back next month. I want ten more. Every month I’ll give you $5,000. You paint, and I’ll buy everything for three years. I never made another ten, because it never took me three days to paint. I made six, I made eight, and I got my girlfriend who was living with me—she had some abilities—I taught her how to paint my background. I’d draw the canvas out and tell her what color to make the background, and I’d paint the foreground. At the end of the month, a Japanese shipper would come crate them up, take them off, and I’d get $5,000.

The art dealer would come to visit twice a year. He was representing Mark Kostabi. And he’d come to town and briefly discuss business: the Japanese don’t understand such and such. Japanese people might like your version of a still life. He would give me notes and what he saw his market as being. He flew me and my girlfriend first class round trip to Tokyo, where I was literally signing autographs ’cause he was selling all my paintings. I was pretty well known. I was interviewed on radio there. For one week, every day I had meetings. I would go to a school to talk. I’d go to the gallery and talk. It was a lot of fun.

When was this?

This was the mid-’90s. Before we went to Japan, the first winter, I thought, Why am I staying in New York? I’m getting $5,000 a month. So I sublet my apartment, and I moved to San Miguel de Allende and rented a house there. And they would send a Japanese shipping company to San Miguel de Allende to pick up the paintings. I ended up staying there for six months, I enjoyed it so much.

What were you painting then?

It started off as very geometric, abstract, ribbons of color. I got accused of using computer graphics. I didn’t own a computer. But they were very clean cut. My work is very crisp now. And when he started suggesting still lifes, I painted objects that looked like bowls of fruit with floating objects around them. I started cubist interiors and such. And I kept on developing. Whatever I did, they encouraged, and that led me back to realism.

Golden Ribbons

What was the influence for your abstract work?

I always drew, but I drew fantasy and realism. No formal education. And I arrived in New York in 1978. In 1979, I started showing in the East Village. I wanted to be an artist. So I took a few life drawing classes at the Art Students League to hone my skills a bit. Then I started doing realist stuff. I painted portraits of all my friends and family. I was adding abstract shapes and geometric elements. I kept on exploring. I sold a piece now and again. I made plastic jewelry, earrings, and necklaces, bold stripes and graphics. I thought, Why don’t I make paintings like that? I started making big, cut-out Masonite illusionary sculptural pieces, much like my jewelry, essentially. The idea of fake 3D.

Masonite Reclining

Is that what drew this Japanese art dealer to you?

Yes, but before I met him I was still bartending. I stopped doing my jewelry because it was just insane. Every area in my apartment was cluttered with jewelry. I was selling to Bloomingdale’s and Patricia Field. They were in Vogue magazine. I was doing it all myself. I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t painting at all. I was making jewelry. So I started bartending again, and I ended up working at this little Japanese-owned after-hours bar in the East Village. I would start work at 10 and get home at 7, 8, 9 in the morning, but it gave me time to paint in the afternoon. We got closed down. The Japanese people who owned the bar took my manager back to Japan to manage a nightclub there. So I gave him a little painting as a gift. And it was one of those like my jewelry, the illusion of 3D. And his boss who owned the nightclub saw it and showed it to the Japanese art dealer. He had several galleries and a fine watch store. When their economy crashed at the end of the nineties, he lost a lot of money, and our association ended.

I’ve read that you had been active in the gallery scene in the eighties. Weren’t you also involved with music videos?

My friend Martin Lasowitz opened a boutique, importing clothing. I was making jewelry. I hand-painted clothing for him. And it wasn’t really a success. So he got into working on music videos through another friend, and he took me along as his guy who made stuff, who painted scenery and made props. We worked on a lot of music videos.

Is that how you got into movies as well?

Yes, pretty much. I stopped doing that, again because it took forever. Martin got into movies and joined the union. And I got back to painting. And still to this day, every now and again, he’ll have a special assignment. He knows—I’ve said this before—I can do anything. I can paint everything from a crying clown on velvet to a “genuine” David Hockney. I’ve been called to do Warhols. I spent a weekend in my underwear sweating in my studio doing Jackson Pollocks for a Japanese TV commercial. I get sent material, they tell me what they want, and I will execute it.

You’ve also done book illustrations.

Many years ago, I got invited to a party in New York City for a songwriter called Doc Pomus, and I met this man called Larry “Ratso” Sloman. He was editor in chief at High Times magazine. I wore a leather jacket that I painted the back of with one of my paintings at the time. And he saw it and said, Did you do that? It’s cool. Come and see me. I might get some work for you. I went up to his offices at High Times, and he said, You know what might be better for you. I sublease an office next door to Heavy Metal magazine. It’s like a graphic novel magazine. I went and met the editor of that, and she said, Maybe you could do a story for us. I’ll tell you what. My husband, Alan Lynch, represents British illustrators. Maybe he’d like to represent you. We met, and he started representing me. I started doing two, three book covers a month, getting paid $2,500 a cover. It was nonstop again. It wasn’t my art. I did it for quite a while, and one of my book covers, It Happened in Boston?, got picked by the Society of Illustrators as the best paperback book cover. Russell H. Greenan was the author. He wrote murder mysteries. The protagonist is the murderer, so you’re reading the story through the murderer’s mind. He was a paranoid schizophrenic who was credited with having the talent of da Vinci. He poisoned first his cat and pigeons; then he started poisoning sugar cubes in restaurants. So I did this pastel drawing of him in the pose of the Mona Lisa, and in the background I had the Mona Lisa hanging on the wall. And his cat had this smile. And the murderer’s head had this big grin. When you die from cyanide poisoning you get this death grin. All these little messages on the book cover. I had a lot of fun doing those, but like I said, it got away from my art. Everything I’ve made, I did get to a certain level of success.

It Happened in Boston? by Russell H. Greenan; illustration by Stephen Hall.

How did you move on to your portraits with the patterned backgrounds?

It’s just an extension of my color sensibility, the patterns and the bombardment of information that we’re constantly surrounded by. That’s how I got into all that business. But over the past few years, I’ve dropped a lot of the hooks and tricks in my paintings to make them special and stand out and focus more on the message, and push my own limits, honing my skills and exploring things I haven’t done before. And I’ve always done that. That’s what the Japanese encouraged me to do. Paint whatever you want to paint. Push your limits. So that’s really when I became an artist for myself, not in anyone else’s eyes.

The Lost Samurai

Were you always using the kind of process that you talk about, for instance, drawing first and making the grids.

Yes. There were periods when I was selling to Japan, I would draw much freer because it was abstract. I was very aware of composition and using compositional tools, objects and shapes to lead your eye around. So when I was pumping out a lot of paintings—I have no time base now; I can paint anything as long as I can—but then I had to knock them out. Essentially, I’d make a sketch and a grid and scale it up. I’ve always done that.

Interior Exterior

You’ve had videos made of your step-by-step process. Do you take photographs of your work in progress?

I do every day. I try to put the painting in the same position. I don’t do it all the time.

When did you start doing that?

It was after the shooting at Sandy Hook in 2012. That was really the turning point when I wanted to have the message in my painting be not open to interpretation. I called my friend Martin Lasowitz, who had become a prop master in movies. I said, I’ve got this idea for a classic still life, but instead of fruit I want guns. Do you have any guns? He said, Sure, I’m a prop master. A few days later, he called me up: “I’m downstairs in the car. Come down.” And he went to the trunk of his car, and he opened the trunk, and he had a big plastic bin in the trunk that said GUNS. And he handed it to me in the street.

So I had the idea: I set up the classic drapery, and there would be a dead bird or a pheasant by the fruit bowl flying—that was based on a photograph I had pinned to my actual still life setup. Instead of the grapes falling onto the drapery, I had bullets. So there’s all these knives, guns, grenades, and I called it American Still Life. It was based on Sandy Hook and Americans’ fascination with weaponry. That was the first time I photographed every day and had someone animate it.

American Still Life

Did you use stencils for that—or did you just look at the props?

I just looked at the actual props. I used a stencil in the background of a dried flower.

You create the stencil.

Yes. What I do is I paint the drapery all in a rust brown, all the warm tones. For the pattern, I look for a pattern so that even a straight flat stencil—and it covers the entire thing—will look like it’s going in and out of the folds. It’s not really. Same for the bowl. I cut out these little skeletons and drew them over the flat bowl so that it looked like they were going around.

I’ve noticed you do have violent imagery in your paintings. What do you attribute that to?

I attribute it to the violence in this country and my abhorrence of it. My main focus right now is on the peril of the planet, obviously. What I say is, I try to make a beautiful painting with a tragic story. So you get drawn in. For instance, Looming Loss: look at this, this whale; wait a minute, it’s in the desert. Why is there a can of Gulflube Motor Oil there? Then they start to think of fossil fuels and extinction.

Looming Loss

Some people have categorized your work as pop surrealism. What do you think about that?

Not a lot. People can categorize and think about what they want.

Actually some of your work looks like photorealism.

Even hyperrealism. Also what I try to do within these paintings, usually I have to point it out—because when you see these paintings in the flesh they’re different from when you see them on-screen. I always start from dark to light in any part of the subject. I paint in a way that patterns of brushstrokes on the buffalo’s ear are the same as the waves in the ocean, folds in clothing are the same as the bark on a tree. We all come from the same stuff. We are all completely and utterly connected. It looks at first hyperreal, photorealistic because I paint it in that manner. I paint it in a way to show that this is realism—we’re all together now. Something along those lines. I don’t have it fully formed out.

Times Out, Raemonds School for Turtles

You’ve certainly mastered painting people.

And animals and fish.

I’ve noticed that you’re quite connected to nature. I don’t know if you grew up near the ocean, but your painting of the ocean is extraordinary.

Yes, I grew up around the ocean. It’s a small fishing town. Aberdeen has got gorgeous beaches. We used to go all the time to the beach. It’s the North Sea. It’s freezing cold. I used to sit and look at the ocean and romanticize being in a warm foreign country across the ocean, not realizing that was Norway and Sweden.

You’ve absolutely captured the colors and the movement of the ocean.

Again, in the one painting I did of a spaceman, The Search for Intelligent Life on Earth, if you look at the patterns of the falling water, just where it breaks, they’re exactly the same as the stitching on his pockets. That is totally incongruous to the scene of the spaceman and the ocean, but they’re tied by the patterns I’m making, showing again we’re all linked. And the bottle of Tide—sometimes it’s subconscious. I didn’t want to put an American flag on the spaceman. I wanted to put a symbol, so I put a symbol of the moon. I put a circle, and I looked when I finished—it’s on the Tide as well. It’s almost the identical positioning of the Tide.

The Search for Intelligent Life on Earth

A happy accident.

Yeah. I’m focused, and my subconscious is pushing me along as well.

What are you working on now?

It’s interesting. Sam said to me a few months ago, Could you please maybe try and paint something not so gloomy? I painted a fire with a house and car burning and a crow and a security camera. It’s called, And They Watch It Burn. I said, That’s not gloomy. She said, It’s terribly sad and gloomy. But it’s a beautiful painting. In fact, Sam sold it the day I finished it. She posted it online, and this collector wrote, I love this. It’s so beautiful, but it makes me cry. And Sam said, If you buy it, you can cry every day. And the collector said, You’re right. I’ll buy it.

And They Watch It Burn

After I finished that one, I was pondering, and I was going back to my old sketchbooks from the ’90s and looked at all these abstract shapes I used to do. And I thought, Oh, what about one of those juxtaposed to a seascape? And I did. So I made this furry floating floofy thing—I have learned how to paint fur now because of all my animals—this abstract shape, and people responded well to it.

Floating Floof

After I finished that, I just had to go back to my nature. And I painted Sin Arboles (Without Trees), and it’s a beautiful toucan sitting on a fallen branch, a tree stump and storm clouds behind it. It’s a beautiful painting, but it’s terribly sad. I finished that, and I’ve started working on another floof painting. It’s going to be smaller, so I’ll make some happy stuff that’s just painting, and I’ll get back to my message.

Sin Arboles

Sam is really important to your life as an artist, isn’t she?

We take the piss out of each other all the time. When she was pregnant, I kept on ribbing her. You’re so lazy; you lie around all day. When Reef was growing up, she said, I should get a job. I said, No, be a mom. When Reef started first grade, Sam went, I should get a job now. I said, Why don’t you think about our family business being art. She’s got a degree in marketing. She does the computer, she does websites, all that stuff. Why don’t you set up my website? We’ll try and build a business. She knew nothing about art seriously. I’d get to know a bit about some website in France, and I’d say, See if you can get my work on that website. She’d research it and set it up. Saatchi & Saatchi, look into them. She’d look into it. She’s built my name globally, literally raised my profile globally. And then she started saying, You’ve got paintings in collections all over the world. I do. I had an Indian collector who bought twenty-five of my paintings over a period of time—the Japanese, Latin America, Europe. I just never thought of it as a business. I still had this idea that I’m just starting out, which is ridiculous. And she said, You’ve got to raise your prices. She started raising my prices, and they still sell. She’s important in marketing my work and making it a viable business.

You have a whole product line: T-shirts, notebooks, greeting cards.

That’s Sam. It’s all custom. What we sell more of is tote bags and throw pillows and such. Every now and again, she’ll put on Instagram, We’re having a summer sale of tote bags, etc. And we’ll get orders. We get them made individually. We ship them off to the clients and mark up the profit. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s little bits that come in.

And your work is getting disseminated, so to speak.

They’ve gone all over Europe, they’ve gone to Australia—all these little things. You have to really look at art as a business as well. For the success I had before with music videos, and illustration and jewelry, I knew a little bit of that business. But not the business of my art. Looking at my art as a business, which Sam has helped do, enabled that. She does things like, she’ll say to people, You like the painting, you can’t afford it? Use the installment plan. Give me a down payment, and you can pay for it over a year.

The Halls: Samantha, Reef, and Stephen

Would you like to say something about Westbeth?

Westbeth has been incredible, apart from the fact that the rent is affordable. It’s a wonderful place to live.

You’ve had shows here at the gallery. Were you getting people to come?

Again that’s down to Sam. She does the mailing list, she sends out the invites, she calls people, she puts it on Instagram, on Facebook, all the social media—and throughout the show, not just for the opening. Paul Muryani, who used to bartend for us, says we have the best openings. And we have people coming through all the time.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about your artwork?

Like I said, there’s a message. My work is not really open to interpretation right now. I’m on a mission. The planet is burning.

(For more about Stephen Hall, go to stephenhallart.com.)

Photo credits: top photo: Wesley Kingston; the Halls: Steve Joester. All images courtesy of Stephen Hall.

Terry Stoller is a Westbeth resident and author of Tales of the Tricycle Theatre.

Profiles in Art, Copyright 2022 Terry Stoller and Westbeth Artists Residents Council