Stephen Westfall
Artist Statement:
I paint abstract arrangements of flat planes of color in oil on canvas, and acrylic on the wall. Though my paintings may look like “hard-edged” paintings, I don’t use tape in painting on canvas. Tape is necessary for the scale of the wall paintings, of course. I think a lot about the relationship between painting and architecture. I wanted my work to address architecture more directly and wall paintings seemed a way to fuse paintings to architectural scale. I regard the wall paintings now as being as essential to my artistic practice as my paintings on canvas and paper, which are bound by more conventional notions of portability and transferability. Over the last several years my compositions have become unmoored from the grid-based compositional structures that had previously organized them. I would like my paintings to be regarded as expressions of energy and place.
Biography:
Stephen Westfall’s (American, b. 1953) paintings have charted a course between post-minimalist geometries and a Pop inflected awareness of a painting as a thing in the world. The brightly colored diamonds, triangles and trapezoids in his most recent canvases are conjoined into dynamic compositional skeins that seem to lean into space rather than recede. He is Professor Emeritus of the Mason Gross School of the Arts. Awards include the Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award; The Rome Prize; Guggenheim Foundation; Nancy Graves Fellowship; NEA Fellowship; NYFFA Fellowship.
AAA:
Member Since: 1988
