Settlement Souvenir Still Life

Steve Lopes

The Work

This piece captures the essence of a life spent collecting, curating, and cherishing small, meaningful objects — from trinkets found while travelling to treasured heirlooms passed down through family. Each object carries its own memory, its own quiet story. This painting stands as a visual representation of that instinct: the pull toward gathering fragments of experience and giving them a place of meaning, each one a small chapter in a much larger, ongoing narrative.

Year: 2016
Medium: Oil on canvas
Image size: 800 x 650 mm
Framed size: 1035 x 895 mm
Catalogue: 0004

Provenance

I purchased this painting from Steve Lopes’ exhibition Still and Still Moving at Mitchell Fine Art Gallery in Brisbane. Subsequently, the gallery requested to loan the piece for inclusion in his survey exhibition Encountered, which was presented at the S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney and the Orange Regional Gallery in New South Wales.

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Framing

A stacked frame in a mid-century idiom, with a recessed outer edge finished in a teal trim chosen to draw out the teal already in the painting. Stacking the mouldings gives the work depth and a substantial edge without adding visual weight, and the recess sets the colour back so it reads as a line rather than a border — it catches the eye only once you are close.

About Steve Lopes

Steve Lopes is an Australian figurative painter, born in 1971. He completed a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales in 1991, and studied further at the Art Students League of New York, later working for a period in London.

He has held around forty solo exhibitions across Australia, London and Hong Kong, and has undertaken residencies including the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, the Bundanon Trust studios on the Shoalhaven, and Yellow Mountain in China. He was one of the artists on the Your Friend the Enemy painting project at Gallipoli, and won the Gallipoli Art Prize in 2018 and The King's School Art Prize in 2021. Earlier, in London, he took the Royal Institute of Oil Painters' Young Artist Award. He has been a finalist in the Doug Moran Portrait Prize eight times and hung in the Archibald Salon des Refusés ten times.

His work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, the Parliament House Art Collection in Canberra, the State Library of New South Wales, the Bundanon Collection, and corporate collections including Time Warner in New York and Rolls-Royce in London.