Iain Stewart is an
award winning watercolor artist and a
signature member of the National Watercolor
Society and the Watercolor Society of
Alabama. He is also President-Elect of the
Watercolor Society of Alabama.
Iain has also
operated Iain Stewart Architectural
Illustration since 1996.
He has created hundreds
of architectural renderings for clients across
the United States, Canada, and the United
Kingdom for a vast array of building / usage
types. As an Architect he understands that an
architectural rendering is first and foremost
about accuracy and the ability to capture and
retain your client’s interest.
In recent years Iain
has renewed his interest in fine art and now
splits his time between the two
disciplines.
From Iain's
bio:
I have always been
intrigued by the play between nature and man
made structures in the landscape of the
rural south. How they decay or survive, are
overgrown or tended to. There is a solidity
and craftsmanship in the construction
techniques of the past that has allowed
these abandoned structures to age gracefully
even in total disrepair. At some point, to
me at least, they become as much a part of
the landscape as trees and landforms.
In my work I often
look for ways to use the man made to anchor
the composition. There is a sense of weight
in these structures or machines that when
combined with the lightness of the natural
world pleases me. In the case of railroad
tracks it’s the machines they are built to
convey that them that make them so
attractive. Everything about the tracks is
grunge and dirt except the tracks themselves
which are polished to a high sheen by the
locomotive that travels on them. They stand
out in the landscape and reflect light in
the most intriguing way.
An early mentor,
Samuel “Sambo” Mockbee, founder of the Rural
Studio at Auburn University certainly helped
drive this interest as well. Sambo
introduced me to the works of Walker Evans
who’s photography of Hale County, Alabama
(the location of the Rural Studio) during
the Great Depression was so brutally honest
in portraying the lives and hardships of the
people who lived there. Truthfully, those
photographs could be taken today in some of
the places where we worked such as Mason’s
Bend, which still has inhabitants that live
in conditions the American public would
consider only possible in the third world.
Man made relics like old buses are used as
housing and a dirt floor is not uncommon. I
am currently planning a series of images of
Hale County.
Sambo also had a
wonderful way of imagining out loud about
what it was like to live here 50 or even 100
years ago. He had a special gift of being
able to draw people in to these musings.
To see now and
imagine these places as they were originally
used is fascinating. It’s very easy to get
out in the country where I live, but
although it is rural here, the reminders of
our impact on the landscape are everywhere.
If I weren’t to combine these two parts of
the whole I think there would be a
fundamental flaw in my process.
