Artist Statement and Biography

My paintings are not political, reactionary, or conceptual. What interests me is not the psychology of the people, but what activities they are doing. I am also fascinated by the whole composition and how certain visual elements like texture, shape, and color help to achieve repetition, pattern, and unity.

In my work of different crowd scenes, suggestion of place is emphasized over specificity. Details like street lines, lights, and signs are left out intentionally. This is done so to engage the viewer's imagination through subtlety and for visual aesthetics. All sorts of individuals are represented in my paintings. They are tour groups of people wearing the same color hats, people walking to work, and photographers capturing the environment. The visual possibilities of figurative representations repeated over and over to make texture and the puzzle-like effects of positive and negative shapes are significant to me. This configuration made from an aerial view gives me the freedom to see the abstract, two dimensional arrangement of parts to a whole.

StephenStrickland.com