“Hopefully I can paint/draw pretty
good”
Steven Assael
Steven Assael
Increasingly
recognized as one of America’s leading figurative painters the New York artist Steven Assael paints narrative works imbued
with a theatrical impulse. He paints and draws from live models, the camera has
no place in his production.
As he told Fine
Art Connoisseur’s Peter Trippi “The great advantage that painting from life
has is the embodiment of what is expected and unexpected. Chance cannot enter
the process this way with photography. Photos can be helpful for general
references, but I’m really all about how ideas are generated by the memory and
the synthesis of experienced perceptions.”
“I usually
start,” he continues, “with a visual, thematic idea – brides, for example – but
the narrative evolves, its subtleties articulated as the painting develops. I
select what is observed to support any change in feeling, or draw on memory, or
respond to the unexpected. Over time, my sitter’s reveal themselves and their
individuality becomes part of the narrative.”
It is a
process he likes to film direction.
“I allow for
the sitters’ performance to interfere with my concept. I think of sitters as
actors, revealing an outward formality and an inner history. As a director, a
strong actor can change everything, can steer the narrative in one direction over
another. The moments in sequence embody the fullness of movement and an
experience.”
Growing up
as an only child Assael developed a love of drawing and encouraged by his
mother he would often visit and sketch in the museums of his home town, New
York.
In a promotional video
for an exhibition at the Forum Gallery Assael said “The nights in armor at The
Met were incredibly powerful and very theatrical as well. In a way I could say that
still stayed with me because I’m very interested in theatre and the idea of art
having a theatrical impulse.”
Today, apart
from making his own paintings, Assael teaches at the New York Academy Graduate School and Brooklyn’s
Pratt Institute as well as conducting master classes at his Manhattan studio.
Driven by his continued interest in deciphering
and depicting life’s strange and often bizarre occurrences, American
Artist reports that Assael impresses upon his student’s “If you have no understanding
of what excites you, you will cease to paint, because you will have no sincere
and no individuated motivation to do so.”
His ccurrent exhibition Steven Assael:
New Paintings and Drawings is on show at New Yorks Forum
Gallery until the 31st of December.
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