When a shop window can be your showroom As a dealer in exotic animals, Guy Stocker's wandering began at 16. Now an artist, he is still on the move, seeking empty shops to hang his work. Premises are transformed by his exuberant acrylics. He lays carpets and adds flowers, a brief blaze of optimism defying the coolness of the conventional gallery. Stocker, who lives in Greencroft Gardens, West Hampstead, says: "I have nothing against galleries. I enjoy them but I found I could market my work more easily myself. Galleries were taking commission on frames as well as the paintings - I had to charge so much for the work." "One needs to show in about six galleries to make a living. Now I spend time promoting my work, but this brings me closer to people and I still have more time to paint. I've been doing it this way for 14 years and just about survive." As he waits for clients he paints, using copies of the Ham & High as a palette for his colours. "I began making high-quality laser copies, which I put in newsagents, changing them each week. As well as having shows in empty shops I hold three or four exhibitions, like extended private views, at home each year. But rather than waiting for people to come to me, I like to take my shows to them." He has permanent exhibition, which is regularly changed, in the Singapore Garden restaurant in Fairfax Road, Swiss Cottage, and his photocopies in local store windows are an inducement to seek the originals. "I had my inaugural show in a shop at Whiteleys in Bayswater before an official gallery opened there. I ended up having six one-man exhibitions on the third floor." Now people in North-West London are familiar with his gifts as a colourist. But he once collected exotic animals for a firm in Camden Town. "I went to the Jungle when I was 16, inspired by Gerald Durrell's books. But most of what I caught escaped," he admits. The late painter Aubrey Williams, who also lived in Greencroft Gardens and came from Guyana, helped him plan a trip there. "I worked as an animal handler too - one job was to manage a 20ft python for the film The Empire Strikes Back." Stocker was also a sitcom writer. But he wanted to paing Teaching himself, he produced small works and was soon exhibiting - some were shown in Chalk Farm Gallery. They sold well during the 1980s and many were printed as greetings cards and calendars through The Gallery in Muswell Hill Broadway. "Fish were particularly popular, especially goldfish - I must have sold 10,000," he says. Flowers and gardens also abound. He claims, "The english are wary of abstraction, although this is what I really enjoy. Luckily, the attitude is changing." He experiments with acrylics; from free application, a familiar form, such as a bird, may emerge in a cosmos of fragmented yet persuasive colour. Veins surface, like ghose of a leaf from some tree in space and there are lilac waves that might be breaking on a twilit and unspecified shore. There is collage: vivid interjections of colour on card, transferred, with a three-dimensional effect on to a dark ground, defined like a sharp-angled room. From these bold experiments comes an integrated world that may expand or contract into fresh fantasies. While much of Stocker's work in figurative, some paintings are suspended between the literal and embryonic freedom. He uses colour in a blaze of trees with a path, improbably orange and blue, reality succumbing to personal expression. "I like surrealism too. I use aspects of animals and I have a collection of dried Lizards, insects and skulls. I like to combine them in strange ways." And there was the faded skin of satsuma on the wall of a recent exhibition. "My father managed to peel this without it falling to bits," says Stocker. "I mouted it on blue when it was still afresh orange colour and someone made me an offer for it. I had to explain it belonged to the family." "I think I shall go on working this way. I like to be free. I don't have to develop one style as I would in a gallery. Paingings is a lonely occupation. It's good to meet people and marketing can be very creative". Linda Talbot H&H SERIES JUNE 26 1998 HOME PORTFOLIO GUY STOCKER PREVIOUS EXHIBITING ARTICLES