Roderick Stevens

I must admit that I love looking at more abstract works, but when compelled to place my own brush to canvas I am drawn to photorealism. I am of course particularly intrigued by how light is refracted through glass and liquid, or reflected off of chrome and shiny surfaces. For now, as opposed to sprawling scenes, I like to study small simple subjects, and display them as prominent, larger than life spectacles. I work from photographs, not just because it is a way of studying a frozen image, but because I am a cinematographer as well and I am particularly fond of light and optics. I enjoy incorporating elements of photography into my art, such as motion blur, depth of field (foreground and/or background out of focus) and other artifacts not natural to human vision. You only see them as a result of the optical process of photography and I take pleasure in capturing them with paint. Lastly, I like to add an extra dimension to my pieces by layering related objects or images onto the surface of the painting as if they’ve fallen onto the canvas.

This is all art school for me. Literally, every painting is my attempt at learning how to tackle something new, while I figure out where I’m going with all of this. It has been exhilarating discovering that there is so much more to learn about my own craft, and to be able to share that with others.

I create in my home in the desert in Arizona where I live with my two children.