I am an artist, living and working in Hastings, a coastal town in the south of England. This website brings together different series of paintings that I have done since 1992.

My work is a personal response to the world around me. In all the series the work begins with an outside inspiration. Nature, in the flowers and landscape works, the human body in the physical process of creating music, in the music series, and the myriad expressions of human desire and suspicion in the Glancing installation.

I began to use watercolour on large scale paintings when I was at art school. I developed a technique of saturating the paper with colour in a series of large sleeping and meditating faces which featured in my final show. These works led on to the flower paintings. In these I used the same techniques in watercolour to convey the sumptuousness of flowers. In the works I would layer on wash after wash of inks to create rich areas of colour. I used wax and bleach to create passages of white if needed. The effect has been likened to stained glass.

The series of music paintings began with extensive drawings of people playing the piano. For three years I attended a piano summer school for advanced music students and keen amateurs. I worked with the students in their practice rooms, furiously drawing while they played. The drawing led on to figurative interpretations in watercolour, inks and pastels of the pianists playing and then to more abstract interpretations of their energetic responses to music. These paintings led on to working with many different musicians and orchestras. The paintings featured in a touring exhibition whereby people attending the show could listen, on headphones, to the actual music which inspired each painting.

A freer more gestural use of watercolour continued to develop in the Glancing installation. Initially, I wanted to create a piece about suspicion between the sexes. In fact what unfolded was a huge installation about sexual attraction, which captured the act of surreptitiously eyeing up the opposite sex. In this work I painted almost 500 life- size faces on paper, half male and half female, each one glancing sideways in the act of surveying. I used photographs and faces in magazines as source material. I used a lot of water in creating these works, allowing the paint to dry in swirling masses of pigment. The paintings are therefore very loose and expressive. Only the eyes of each individual head had to stay visible and focused in their act of surveillance.

I had a long break in my practice in 1996 and worked in development in Africa and the UK. In 2005, after the birth of my son, I resumed painting, responding to the Sussex countryside around me in the landscape series. Alongside works on paper, I have begun working in oil on canvas. Building up an oil painting is so much slower than making a watercolour. These new works have a consequential stillness; the monolithic stillness of green boulders, of beaches of glowing worn down chalk pebbles in sunshine. The process involved working directly onto the canvas outside, often for several sessions, then working them up in my studio. I also have made some works using oil paint on paper. Here I used washes of oil as if it was watercolour, thinned down with turps, to convey the chaos of busy beaches at the height of summer.

Stephanie Fawbert, Hastings, October 2008.