Gerard Stamp was born in Kent in 1955, although Norfolk soon became his home. He went to school under the shadow of Norwich Cathedral, where he developed a passion for drawing and painting, and for architecture. As a schoolboy in the 1960’s, he would cycle into the Norfolk countryside to sketch and explore churches and landscape, with Pevsner’s Buildings of England in his saddle bag. On rainy days he might be found in the Norwich Castle Art Gallery, studying the architectural watercolours of John Sell Cotman, his artist hero and to a great extent his posthumous tutor.
After Art College, Gerard pursued a commercial career rising through several London advertising agencies to become creative director of one of the largest, Leo Burnett. In 2001, under his Chairmanship, the London agency became the most creatively awarded advertising office in the World. But throughout this time he was barely concealing a passionate desire to one day quit in order to paint full time. |
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He finally realized his dream in early 2002. He moved from London to join his wife and two children in North Norfolk, where he built a studio. However, the next few years were a mixture of triumphs and disasters: anxious to avoid pastiche or cliché, and determined to find his own visual language through experimentation, dozens of paintings were deemed to be failures and were destroyed.
In 2005 he held his first solo show, at the Grapevine Gallery, Norwich. The response (a sell-out) was extraordinary – selling to clients across the social spectrum from a Knight of the Garter to a student who took out a bank loan. In the same year he won first prize at Norwich Castle’s inaugural Norfolk Open Art Show.
In 2006 he held his first London solo exhibition, in Cork Street, a show which travelled to York Minster. Since then he has had four more one man shows, including ‘Mediaeval’, a celebration of church architecture in East Anglia, and ‘Marshscape’, |
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a series of large studies featuring the North
Norfolk coast.
In March 2009 he held an exhibition at Bonhams, New Bond Street, London entitled ‘Twelve Churches’, a collaboration with The Churches Conservation Trust to celebrate their 40th Anniversary.
In 2010 Gerard Stamp’s life seems to have come full circle. Returning once more to Norwich Cathedral, he has been asked to stage an exhibition celebrating the formal opening by Her Majesty the Queen of the ‘Hostry’, a new Exhibition and Visitor Centre designed by Sir Michael Hopkins and one of the largest Cathedral developments since the rebuilding of Coventry. |
