Robert Stone’s wistful paintings place characters in vaguely delineated, brightly colored settings, as though memory is reclaiming an unfinished but sensory image. The tragic figures are paired with strange, displaced props creating a surreal, dreamlike environment.

In Air India, two figures from a distant past, nevertheless wearing contemporary Vans and Converse sneakers, are placed against a blurred wash of yellow color. In Air India Sunglasses Excuse, a young man in dark glasses precariously sits on a coffin amidst a hazy background of leafless trees. Like Stone’s other paintings, these images weave together seemingly mundane details (popular sneakers, an Air India logo from a recent trip) with personally significant objects like the sunglasses that his father wore only once at a funeral.

Stone graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London and has exhibited in group shows throughout the United Kingdom. His paintings were included in the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2005 exhibition that toured Manchester, Bristol, and is currently at London’s Barbican Art Gallery. In July 2005 Art Review magazine named Stone one of the top 25 M.A. graduates in the U.K.