Pain, loss and then striving for success (From York Press)

Pain, loss and then striving for success

11:48am Monday 14th November 2011 in Features By Jo Hughes

Artist Richard Stuttle is the brother of York backpacker Caroline Stuttle, left, who was murdered in Australia in 2002. This personal tragedy led to a determination to make the most of his own life and now he has a major exhibition in New York. JO HUGHES reports.

RICHARD Stuttle was making a pretty good life for himself in 2002 when tragedy struck.

A successful chef, he had worked at The Blue Bicycle and The Grange Hotel in York before taking up a job on the Isle of Oban. Following his dream of travelling, he began to work the winter season in the French Alps, where he took up snowboarding.

Then came the devastating news that his sister, Caroline, had been murdered at the age of 19 while backpacking in Australia. This changed everything.

Richard and his father, the Scarborough artist Alan Stuttle, travelled to Australia to make a personal appeal for witnesses to Caroline’s death, and went to the trial of her killer, Ian Previte.

“We had to sit in the court room, with the guy in the same room,” he recalls. “Why would people do that, why would you? How can I forgive someone that’s robbed me of my sister, and robbed her of her life, robbed her of 50 years? I’ll never go to her wedding, I’ll never see her children, never see how she could have changed the world...”

He returned to the UK. Desperate to try to pick up the pieces and make sense of things, he and his mother, Marjorie Marks-Stuttle, set up Caroline’s Rainbow Foundation, a charity dedicated to educating young people about safe travel, with David Marks. It is still run by Marjorie, who lives near Pocklington, and Richard regularly undertakes work, educating youngsters in schools and helping with fundraising events.

But then his life changed direction in another way. Sometimes, he says, tragedy can drive you on to achieve greater things. “The waiting and longing, the loneliness if someone has been taken from your life, makes you strive for bigger things.”

Richard had already learned painting from his father, who for many years had a gallery in York.

In 2003, he decided to go off travelling and cooking. He started to do watercolours every day, and his love for painting and art was rekindled. It was partly an excuse to get out and away, a chance to be alone, doing something but still being by himself.

He kept a diary of sketches and paintings, all dated, the paintings recording how he felt from day to day. “Painting is recording,” he says. “I had a lot of heartache.”

And so began a new career, as an artist: a career that has now resulted in a major exhibition at a gallery in New York.

Many of his paintings are of extreme sports. His interest in those goes back to his days as a teenager, skateboarding in York.

“It was a form of freedom of expression, it is not the same as team sports, it’s more about what you put in and what you get out, more for personal evolution,” he says.

“We were not respected, we were classed as criminals, but we weren’t just hanging around on street corners, we were learning a skill, hours and hours go into learning it.”

In his work, he tries to capture great moments of brilliance by practitioners he has come to know well in his own ‘adrenaline junkie’ life. His paintings highlight spectacular physical prowess and athletic achievements which may otherwise go unseen.

“What I’m creating is contemporary adrenaline,” he says. “I’m capturing professional athletes on canvas, capturing the most creative moments in contemporary sports.”

This is especially true in his paintings of Parkour, where athletes use the urban environment as a dangerous obstacle course, running, rolling, leaping, and climbing through gaps, pipes, across rooftops, onto the tops of buses, or over cars.

Some are highly detailed, almost photo-realistic; others are chiselled silhouettes, giving an impression of something unreal happening in the land of superheroes.

Many of his paintings show scenes he has witnessed for himself, on the mountain slopes where he is an avid snowboarder, the sea where he surfs, in the streets – whether it is the streets of English cities like York, where he was a teenage skateboarder, or the more imposing cityscapes of New York.

The moments he captures demand high levels of fitness. He concentrates on sports he knows best, with a passionate reverence for ‘creative athletes’ who set up and take on challenges for themselves, and often for no other reward than the achievement itself.

“I try to capture a moment, I take the initial image, my feeling and passion goes into creating that, you can only paint what you know.”

He admits he remains as driven in his work today as he was when he first took up art again after Caroline’s death.

“Everybody believes they are immortal,” he says. “I have a belief for Caroline that people have got work to do in this life or the next, people go where they are most needed.

“I feel I have a lot of work to do now, painting, and working for the charity. I feel I have to do it twice as much now. I feel I have to experience for two, especially for my mother and father.

“We are blessed with consciousness, it is our biggest blessing and our biggest downfall, the only thing that limits our potential is our conscious mind…we are here and we live in the moment, otherwise we’ll miss it, and what of it will we get back…We are not here for a long time, but we are here for a good time.”

• For information on Richard Stuttle’s latest exhibitions, at the Agora Gallery in New York, and a retrospective collection on show in Scarborough, to see more of his paintings or for commissions visit his website, richardstuttle.com