by My father, Stanford Fraser Steele, who died at the age of 82, was a productive creator and artist. His art included drawing, sculptures, video, local installations and woodworking.
Throughout his working life, Stan has been a guest teacher and external examiner for many art schools and senior lecturer for art at the University of East London (formerly North East London Polytechnic) for 30 years. His work of art takes place in private collections and in the government’s art collection.
He was born in Edinburgh as the son of Mai (born Kerr Smith), an assistant by the architect, and George Fraser Steele, a psychiatrist, and had a fascinating childhood. Stan lived in a psychiatric hospital near Dundee for many years, where his father worked. It was a Victorian building in a baronial style, surrounded by forests and with a working farm on which Stan spent his time to drive the fergie tractor, cut wood and pick potatoes with the patients.
After studying at the High School of Dundee and then at the Brentwood School in Essex, he went to the Walthamstow School of Art at the age of 16, where he met the musician Ian Dury who became a long -time friend. Both went to the Royal College of Art in London and were taught by Peter Blake in the early 1960s.
Stan Rachel Wellings, who studied textiles, met in the RCA (where he was awarded the silver medal for painting and the Prix de Rome travel area. They married in 1967. Stan rented a floor with other artist fans in St. Katharine Docks, East London, the first space studio. With Keith Albarn and other artists, he designed the world of Islam festival at the ICA, London, who went to Rotterdam as Islamathematica exhibition and culminated in the publication of the language of pattern (1974) in 1971.
A change from London to the landscape in 1975 renewed Stan’s childhood interest on tractors and land. It stimulated ideas that become repeated topics in his work of art: men and machines, both their relationship with the country and their expressions of the memories that the machine created. He bought vintage tractors, an old truck and other farm machines, learned to plow and acquired a sawill to cut wood. He made charcoal drawings and tone wall reliefs of the machines and figures, recorded the tractor noise and embroidered a piece of embroidery that shows the technical details of his tractor.
In the 1990s, Stan Zu Housewatch, a group of artists who used video and film, went to work at various locations in London: Broadgate Square, the South Bank and Hoxton Square for the opening of the Lux Center before performing a Touring exhibition in Japan in 1992.
One of Stand’s pioneering work was in the Cuckoo Farm Studios, Colchester (1995). One hectare was a one-year installation with living work cultivation and harvesting potatoes in a field that he plowed. Part of the harvest was served in the Cafés of the Whitechapel and Arnolfini art galleries.
Stan retired from the University of East London in 1996 and moved to Suffolk Coast. He sold his tractors to work on the restoration of wooden boats and to design and build his own studio. He recently moved to Edinburgh, where he returned to work on large -scale charcoal drawings, wood reliefs and the production of woodwork.
He is survived by Rachel, his children Sam and me, his grandchildren, Ruby, Honey and Bryce and his brother Graeme.
