Michael Stanley, the director of Modern Art Oxford, studied art at the city’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and returned to the city in January last year to take up this exciting and challenging post. As a boy growing up in a small terraced house in the industrial town of Widnes, Michael, 34, admits it was unusual for a young lad to have a burning passion for art — football and rugby league were more common enthusiams.

Instead of spending his Saturday afternoons on the terraces, Michael headed for the Walker Art Gallery or Tate Liverpool.

“I had two formative experiences and they both involved the journey between two great northern cities, Liverpool and Manchester.” Michael said. “I was inspired by the legacy of Victorian philanthropy in the many municipal galleries that exisit in the northwest — and, with the beauty of the Lake District on my doorstep, I was turned into some kind of post-industrial romantic.”

One of Michael’s early dramatic encounters was with the work of Pre-Raphaelite artist Holman Hunt in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight — built in 1922 as Lord Lever’s remarkable ‘gift’ to the memory of his wife.

“I saw Holman Hunt’s Scapegoat. It was one of those incredible encounters with a work of art that I felt I already knew, having poured over so many reproductions of it. Millais and Gerrard Brockhurst’s Jeunesse Doree also stayed with me.’ “It was the perfect accompaniment to a youthful imagination taken up by Victorian artists, The Smiths, Oscar Wilde, and a love of TS Eliot.”

Michael is an advocate of contemporary performance art and installations, which seem a world away from the work of Victorian artists. However, he believes that art is a journey which leads each generation to new encounters.

Another formative experience for the new director of Modern Art Oxford was ecclesiastical art.

“I was brought up in a strong Roman Catholic family, so seeing art in churches was inevitable, though in most services I’d be distracted and draw a detail of the Station of the Cross or something on the back of the hymn sheet.

“On a school trip to Tuscany, when I was 14, I had my first sight of the 15th century artist, Piero della Francesca’s incredible painting of the Resurrection in Borgo San Sepolcro. Soon after, in a tiny chapel on a hillside in Arrezo, I saw his pregnant Madonna.

“They were such powerful experiences, as vital now as at the time they were made.

“Art is inescapable from the context within which you experience it — the thoughts, memories and emotions that you bring to a work.

“Seeing these remarkable works and the ‘encounter’ with them has really stayed with me. Still, in my work today, I consider myself choreographing a journey of encounters with works of art — a journey that continues with Susan Phillipsz audio installation at the Observatory at Green College.’”

Michael first encountered contemporary art at an exhibition of the work of German artist, Joseph Beuys, at Tate Liverpool.

“The sight of basalt rocks scattered over the floor of the gallery evoked an immediate response — strong, primitive and yet magical,” he said.

“Beuys was using materials not usually regarded as art materials to symbolically transcend everyday realities and to build his own mythology.”

“During my Easter break, I made a nostalgic trip back to Widnes to photograph the relics of the town’s Victorian marketplace that was due for demolition,” Michael recalled “In a small back room, I came across the old municipal Christmas lights, about to be trashed. I spent three days rewiring them and with the help of a generator, found by my uncle, I managed to get them to function for all of 40 seconds and was able to snap a couple of photographs, before they faded — and with them, in many respects, my career as an artist!

“I was frustrated by not being able to share tmoments like this with other people and with other artists and, from that point, became more interested in making opportunities to make work other than myself.’ Michael has bought all these formative influences to bear on his new job in Oxford.

“For me Modern Art Oxford is more than just a building, it is an ‘idea’— an idea about contemporary life that many different audiences can engage with in many different situations,” he said.

“I want to create a bridge, especially for young people, who may be intimidated about crossing our threshold. I want them to have the opportunity to have encounters with art that can challenge horizons and change lives — as my visits to the Liverpool and Manchester galleries changed mine.

“Next year, we will be remodelling our entrance on to St Ebbes, literally bringing the street into the gallery and the gallery into the street. We will be looking to extend our evening opening hours and to have a much more dynamic programme that sees the visual arts combining with music, performance, poetry and dance.

“Against the backdrop of the reopening of the fantastic Ashmolean development, now more than ever is a time for the city to embrace the vitality of contemporary culture,” he added.

‘It is incredible to think that, in 2015, Modern Art Oxford celebrates its 50th anniversary, If there is one thing to take on the desert island, it would be Modern Art Oxford’s archive.

“It is amazing to read through the correspondence between Nicolas Serota and Joseph Boeys, for instance.’ So would the correspondence be his final choice to take on the island?

“I don’t like the idea of living with just one work of art but if that is the reality, then it has to be Pierro della Francesca’s Resurrection.”