Stephen Allwood was born in 1959 in Fiji. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Canterbury University, majoring in printmaking. During this period, he spent a year painting icons on the walls of the [Greek Orthodox] Church of the Transfiguration in the Wairarapa, New Zealand, where he now lives. His earlier work reflects the influence of this experience and of his Catholic upbringing.
More recently his painting has focused on everyday objects in his semi-rural environment - farm and wine-making machinery, recycling depots and wood piles. Taking such banal subject matter, and painting in a direct, simple style, Allwood finds beauty in things we don't normally consider as beautiful or worthy of interest, and his works speak as much about the act of painting as its varied subjects.