Metamorphoses by Rick Stevens

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Rick Stevens exhibition took place on June 25th. The artist paints his paintings in oil on canvas or pastels on paper. According to Stevenson himself, all 25 years that he has been painting, he was inspired by nature and the world around him. During his career, he tried many different styles, worked on dozens of themes and the current one - abstraction, according to the artist, is the culmination of his career. All of Stevenson's works are devoted to the metamorphoses of nature, where one flows into the other, thus achieving a delicate balance in which the circulation of life never stops.

The artist himself says: “My works can be perceived as open windows to other worlds. Their visual vocabulary was formed from many years of painting, which gradually turned into landscape sketches. And although I do not consider myself a landscape painter, nature remains my main muse. I understand nature as endlessly interacting streams of energy, constantly changing their forms, more precisely, it is a kind of intellectual, self-regulating force. Most modern physicists tell us that forces and particles in nature have the same structure, they only affect our consciousness in different ways. Forces are a kind of unified field."

“Paying tribute to the school of abstractionism, I still do not consider myself to be one of it, because this movement, as a rule, focuses all attention on the process of work itself, for them it is a thing in itself, identical with art. And although I would like to remain an adherent of the modernist idea of a certain orientation of art and the process of creativity itself, behind the forms and colors of my paintings there is always another sphere that necessarily contains meaning (no matter how abstract it may be)."

“A sense of style, form is very important to me, but I try to avoid strict divisions along the lines. Art also seems to me a kind of "fluid" substance, where one detail flows smoothly into another. My compositions are held together by a common light pouring into everything around. This allows you to give them integrity, in my canvases no part can be clothed from the whole. Yes, as in the natural world, they have a variety, but there are also obvious unity of these heterogeneous elements within the whole."

Rick Stevens admits that most of his work is improvisation (although sometimes he still uses sketches), which, in his opinion, allows creativity to develop organically.

You can familiarize yourself with the artist's works in more detail on his website.