Summer highlights before a year hiatus

In just a few days, I will be starting a year long adventure. I'm moving to Cote d'Ivoire (west Africa), to volunteer. I hope to spend my time loving children and using art as a bridge to build relationships and facilitate healing. We will see what this year truly holds - only God knows, literally. I am taking a hiatus from oil painting for this year, but will be fueling my creativity into journal making, watercolors, sketching, AND I am bringing my Diana mini (see photos below). Sooo, au revoir! "Until we meet again"

Please follow me on my travel blog!

These tomatoes were homegrown and later eaten.

I experimented with real film, using a Diana Mini

For the Sovereigns

Traveling to Africa??

http://steph-africa.blogspot.com/

I have just graduated from Arcadia University with a BFA in painting, and pre-art therapy. Looking towards next steps, I have decided to take a gap year before grad school, and what better way to spend it than doing something good for the world. My searching has led me to a program called Journey Corps in Cote d'Ivoire, Africa. There, I will have the opportunity to spend time with, love, and create artwork with children and young women rescued from human trafficking. If all the money can be raised, I will leaving on this year-long journey September 13th.

Please subscribe to this BLOG, to keep updated on my future plans and travels.

Complete Senior Thesis work

4' x 4' Oil on Canvas

4' x 4' Oil on Canvas

16" x 20" Oil on Canvas

16" x 20" Oil on Canvas

20" x 20" Oil on Canvas

22" x 30" Oil on Canvas

20" x 20" Oil on Canvas

Thesis Statement:

In Greek, there are two words for life: Zoe and Bios. Zoe is the grand view of existence, Bios, the subtle interactions of objects and people. My work is about the contrast of these two realities. This current series of paintings is a response to last year, spent gallivanting across Europe, versus this year that I lived in a contained, geographic location. Glenside is my Bios, and Europe, my Zoe. Traveling gave me a larger perspective of the world, which has become more localized since I returned home. The juxtaposition of tomato and figure is a dialogue between Zoe and Bios. It is a relationship between vast and minute, universal and specific. What I paint sits within a confined space, but I see it with the same eye I have used to view my most liberating experiences.

Thesis!

Thesis day has come and gone! I'm so excited about how my exhibition turned out, and I cannot wait to post photos. I'll have more photos posted in the future, but for now, here are a few bits of the show.

Carrie, 20"x20", oil on stretched canvas

Painting seniors! : Steve, Emily, me, Niki,

Yovanna, Rebecca, Jess, Arianne, Claire

More to come soon!

What do I want to paint?

“Cezanne seems to have hands in his eyes and eyes in his hands. When Cezanne paints a tree or an apple, he does not paint a copy of a tree or an apple, he paints its nature. He paints the whole that it is, the whole that is lost to us as we pass it, eat it, chop it down."

-Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects

Afternoon Sun, 4'x4', oil on canvas

I'm in the midst of a bit of a thesis crisis.. which isn't really a crisis at all. I am just second guessing myself and trying to figure out what I really WANT to paint. There are a lot of things I could paint, but where is the energy?

The rough draft of my thesis paper was due this week. Here are a few excerpts:

Visiting Musée de l’Orangerie, to see Monet's Water lillies:

"I remember one particular panel, in which the color of the water was painted as a vibrant yellow, and the water lilies were more abstracted than in any other. I thought, “This cannot be truly what it looked like, it doesn’t seem like a pond at all.” But I remembered back to a trip I had taken up north in Scotland, to a very secluded part of the highlands. When I woke up in the morning, around 7 am, I walked out to the edge of the loch, and witnessed the colors of the water. It was filled with dull violets and yellows, not at all the bright blue of the previous afternoon. I realized then that we have always depicted the water as blue because it reflected the sky, and that the loch at 7 am also reflects the sky though it is not blue. Monet had perceived the color of the pond to be yellow, just as I did that morning in Scotland. "

Figure and the tomato series, 16"x20", oil on canvas

"I am working with this concept of depicting life from the Bios or microcosm view in which the small subtleties between things are more important. This is very dependent on light, as it can abstract the composition, becoming more important than the figures or the tomatoes themselves. Space is also an important component of my work, as it creates relationships and narratives between figures and objects in the composition. The Zoe, the macrocosm, should not be forgotten either, because for me, it is that grand view of life that I wish to portray even in the smallness of things."

Student Biennial + recent work

Featured in Arcadia's Bulletin (Feb 2nd, 2010), written by Sarah Schwartz

Student Biennial '10 / "Tomato" / 16"x20"

Arcadia University's gallery (that's my college) hosts a student biennial, for which the artwork is picked by an outside curator. This year, philadelphia curator Sue Spaid was asked to choose the work. I was pretty elated, as one of my paintings was chosen. My first curated exhibition, and second group exhibition.

This painting was done, after the 3 of the previous post. It's part of an exploration of the relationship between the individual and a transitional object (the tomato). I really loved how huge the tomato looked in comparison to the boy, and the subtle color relationships in the composition. I'm not sure how much more will come from this series..

Looking forward to thesis, I've been replacing the transitional object with intense areas of light. Here's a painting I did in December, as my first try at this concept:

More to come from this.. I'm working on a few right now.

Tomato

I have been working with this concept of balancing the object and the negative space.  It started with tomatoes, an object very close to my heart.  I enjoyed painting how they felt to me, how the light interacted with the color, with a newness and excitement.  And I now that I'm incorporating people, they feel like another piece added to this push and pull of space.  I like focusing on the smallness of life, the intimate view of such a simple object.  I don't think this is really about tomatoes at all.  But I'm trying to figure out what it is about.