SLART

b. 1982 · Swindon, UK

A Swindon painter who put his pencils down as a teenager, picked them up again at 37, and five years later built the gallery this guide lives in.

The life

Steven Light was eleven in 1993 when a national children’s drawing competition, judged by Raymond Briggs and Quentin Blake, made him one of ten winners in the country. Then came a twenty year detour away from drawing altogether. He returned to it at 37, self-taught and painting as SLART, and chronic kidney disease soon pushed the work somewhere serious: memento mori by a man who had been close enough to check. In 2026 he co-founded Studio BRUT in Swindon with the artist Harrie Dearing.

The work

Figurative expressionism in oils and acrylics on large canvases, human faces and stories first, with the colours of a 1980s childhood and the shadow of the hospital ward. Bloodlines, a self-portrait begun at one of his first dialysis sessions, sits in a series documenting kidney disease. He is also a muralist, with commissioned outdoor pieces including Swindon’s largest mural, and has shown in solo exhibitions at Artsite and The Post Modern (2022), MAMS Gallery (2024) and The Crypt Gallery, London (2025), with group shows from Berlin to Brussels.

Why we love them

Full disclosure: he wrote half of this field guide, so we are not impartial. But a man who answers kidney failure with paintings and an empty glass building with a gallery is what the word outsider is for.

Go deeper

• slart.me, the artist’s own site and CV.
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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