Stewart Lees is an artist with over thirty years experience. He was born in Hertfordshire in 1954 and grew up on the South Coast and in London. He studied at Twickenham (now Richmond) School of Art and Design and was taught by the maverick painter Stan Smith.

Stewart originally pursued a career as a freelance Illustrator and Designer based in Central London, eventually establishing his own Design consultancy in Richmond. In the early nineties, with computer's muscling in on all areas of design and illustration and replacing the use of traditional skills, he took the decision to give (almost) all of it up and move the family to deepest, rural France to be a painter. With Graphic Design and Illustration commissions from England continuing, he soon established a reputation locally as a landscape painter and found himself in demand as a teacher, going on to hold successful one man shows in Bordeaux, Bergerac and Perigueux.

In more recent years, having returned to England, Stewart has written and illustrated two children's books and devoted himself to developing further as a painter. Lately he has turned more and more towards Still Life, “….finding myself, like a portrait painter, concerned with surface but trying all the time to say something deeper about the subject before me, to turn the familiar into something extraordinary”.

Stewart has taken a great deal of pleasure and inspiration from studying the Dutch Stilleven artists of the 17th century but he also find himself returning again and again to the works of Andrew Wyeth, whose interiors, landscapes, figures and still life paintings captured light, texture and, above all mood and atmosphere, almost entirely through the most obsessive and meticulous draughtsmanship.