“The continuous flowering of my style is the most important thing to me; I want my work to vibrate with the same energy I walk through life with,” – Says Stirling.
Stirling Caiulo is a mixed-media artist based in Melbourne. His work walks the fine line between abstraction and realism, often leaving information out so the viewer can create their own story for the piece.
He has been practicing drawing since 2013 but started rapidly developing a voice and the techniques needed to execute his ideas in 2019 and has been all in ever since.
In 2012 Stirling was living in his hometown Perth, Australia, when a modeling scout from an Italian agency (Crew) met with his local representation (Chadwick) for prospects. Stirling was unable to attend the meeting but a few weeks later received a call asking if he wanted to take a plane to Italy and participate in the Milan Fashion Week. Stirling accepted immediately and, upon arrival, experienced a very different way of life to his hometown. He was soaking in new and unfamiliar cultures while traveling Europe for work and meeting some of the top designers and creators in the world, admiring their attention to detail for their craft.
During his downtime in a small apartment in Milan, one of his friends would often draw to pass the time. Stirling was inspired and, in turn, bought his own sketch pad. While sketching people down by the canals of Milan, hours of his time would go missing, and this would be the feeling Stirling would fall in love with. Practicing for years to chase the feeling of ‘flow’ while creating, Stirling continued to resist taking anything seriously, as he couldn’t imagine art as a career for himself. Seven years later, the call for him to sink more time into art became louder and harder to ignore. Then the thought struck him- ‘how far could he take a piece of art?’ Stirling sunk three months of time into one drawing, and the old ceiling to his work was now blown open. Now how far could he take things? And in what direction? Stirling started to understand and respect art as his means of communication. What’s the difference between a fast stroke or a slow one? Being thoughtless while creating or being meticulous? He’s always liked misdirection in art from films like Refn’s Drive, the way a Haruki Murakami novel unexpectedly guides an audience into a surreal world, and the way rappers like Lupe Fiasco spontaneously create lyrics as a freestyle.
Stirling wanted to find a balance between the two sides of himself: the expressive, the one who wanted to travel and soak in the world, and the other who wanted to stay in his apartment and find his flow. This is why he likes his work to dance between abstraction and realism, or as he calls it, ‘finding the line between the earth and sky.’
Stirling Caiulo has been a finalist for the last 2 years in the Lester Prize, a major Australian portrait prize. He is now working on writing and illustrating his own graphic novel while he continues to take on commissions for oil portraits and large-scale murals.
I try to “find the line between the earth and sky.”