HP13-0306, 2013

Stephen Maine  

Stephen Maine (born 1958) is an American abstract painter, writer, curator and professor. He is a member of the American Abstract Artists and editor for Artcritical.com. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Maine obtained a Bachelors degree in arts at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. He obtained a Masters degree in Visual Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Vermont in 2014. From 2006 to 2016, he taught fine arts at the School of Visual Arts of New York. He currently teaches at the Parsons Design School and at the New York State University.

His paintings awaken and present contemporary ideas about color, composition, surface and process. Color itself, and the material properties of painting as an integrated color, are Maine's main inspiration. His open and intentionally imprecise production methods yield results that can not be accurately predicted. The artist said "This work gave me a concrete way to think about the compositionality, the seriality, the improvisation, the presentation and the psychology of visual perception".

In a process that closely resembles relief engraving, Maine uses textured surfaces to indirectly apply acrylic paint to a prepared canvas.He makes these surfaces or "plates", some of which are quite large, from ordinary materials such as plywood, extruded foam, plastic and glue.
In an article in The Brooklyn Rail, artist and writer Tom McGlynn described Stephen Maine's work as follows:

"Maine has a clear formal control over its palette, due to a long inquiry into the color, translucency and influence of color on the quasi-permanent tectonics of "paint space "...it is key to his practice. The color can directly engage the physiological mechanism of the eye while simultaneously initiating an associative logic chain in the random memory "

Maine's work has been exposed in numerous solo exhibitions in New York, and in group exhibitions throughout the United States, as well as in Europe and Mexico. His work is part of permanent collections in several important institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library ...