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Steuart Allin

Steuart Allin was born in Brighton in 1915 and educated in Ipswich, Suffolk, England. As a registered conscientious objector during the Second World War, he worked on a community farm. He immersed himself in the labour and community but also developed his painting and writing skills, encouraging others to do the same.

After the war, Allin worked in music publishing in London before later retiring to Dorset. He travelled extensively around Britain, painting and sketching rock formations and stone monuments from prehistoric times. Allin cheerfully acknowledged his obsession with stone, saying that to him it had 'an especial eloquence'. The facets and forms of natural stones and those carved or placed by humans have a sinuous form in Allin's works - at once solid and unyielding but also swirling and fluid, both forming and flowing into the landscapes around them. It was the permanent/changeable, natural/man-made conundrum of ancient stone that drove the quasi-religious thoughts of his paintings and writings.

Steuart Allin died in 2002.