PETER STEPHENS BIOGRAPHY
*guest artist
Based in Buffalo, New York, Peter Stephens has worked for more than three decades as an exhibiting artist. Stephens earned his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and also attended the University of Siena in Italy and New York’s Rochester Institute of Technology. His work has been shown in galleries and museums across the United States, in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Buffalo, San Diego, and Santa Fe, among other cities. Stephens’s work appears in various museum collections, including those of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, and the Brooklyn Museum.
Stephens states, “ These new paintings take form with an underlying grid of commercial paint sample cards. This allows me a spontaneous, interchangeable surface to explore color relationships and interactions within given parameters. The layers of acrylic matrix elements come next, all handwork applied line by line. As with numbers in equations, the quantities, sequences, repetitions, and rhythms all contribute to a rich optical blend of color combinations. A given set of colors results in an exponential number of different perceptions. Along with these pure abstractions of form and color come cultural references to histories of art and design with immediate associations to sumptuous textiles and complex architectural mosaics.
The evolution of this work is ongoing; it will change and develop as each new mutation moves the morphology forward. These paintings are not illustrations of specific laws that shape the universe and ourselves but an artist’s answer to their implicit resonances. The paintings translate scientific inspirations into a visual, multilayered landscape that in layer after layer enfolds one gradient of reality on another.”
