Strauss & co - 15 February 2020, Cape Town

of photographs, exhibition catalogues, museum and art gallery guidebooks, art historical studies and monographs. It is from this huge, constantly expanding archive that Stone sources virtually all of his imagery. Because of his reliance on the real rather than the imagined, the artist’s creativity does not emerge in his choice of motifs. Stone’s subject matter is rarely original, however, it is his mode of configuring it. […] Stone says that no blue-print or master plan is there to guide him when he commences a painting.” 1 “When I first start a work, I may have a sense of the mood I wish to convey, but I have no idea what the final result will be, nor what different visual elements I will introduce into the painting. My point of departure is usually a single visual idea, and once I get it down on canvas, I simply improvise as I go along.” 1. Lloyd Pollak (2013) Simon Stone Collected Works , Stellenbosch: SMAC Art Publishing. Pages 124 to 127. 101