Stephen Young has lived and worked in Wales for the past thirty years. Born in Surrey in 1946, he studied at Guildford School or Art between 1962 and 1964, and at Chelsea School of Art from 1964 to 1968 at both degree and post graduate levels. Following a spell as Artist in Residence at Sussex University he took up a post as lecturer at Cardiff College of Art, eventually becoming head of department. He has recently retired and now paints full time. Stephen has exhibited regularly in Cardiff and in London, including The Hayward Gallery and The Serpentine Gallery. He also exhibits regularly in Spain and his work is represented in public and private collections.

Stephen has experimented widely as an artist, ranging from highly reductive abstract painting in his early years through a period of large painted sculptural construction, before arriving at his mature style. His greatest influences now come from French art, in particular the deceptive lightness and fragility of Watteau and Fragonard and the complex and subtle use of pictorial space in Poussin.

His work is particularly admired by Harry Holland who writes:

‘Steve Young is an artist with a particular vision. His paintings are drawn from real events and places and transformed by a very distinct imagination. He makes a theatre in which the impedimenta of human relationships become comedies, ironies, peculiarities, played out against each other in a world almost, but not quite, like the one we think we know. The subjects are intimate and personal but, as with all good artists, these stories are told in such a way that the artificiality and the apparent eccentricity are a means of expressing the bits and pieces of all of our lives that make up the human comedy. He points to the real and shows us how strange it can seem if we look at it with a generous and loving eye.’

This exhibition consists of new paintings and drawings on the theme of ‘An Evening Out’ to coincide with the staging of the 2015 Cardiff Singer of the World.