Meet the artist

Christopher Stevens

The dominant theme in Christopher Stevens’ art is an examination of the conceptual potential in the materials by which art is made, be it paint, the photograph or the video. Stevens uses them as vehicles by which to explore ideas that are of interest to him. Through them, Stevens has discovered a rich seam of creative production.

 

The series of works by Christopher Stevens that appear on the ArtLab website follow this model by looking at the relationship between the media of painting and photography. Stevens has harvested a body of imagery from the sports pages of daily newspapers; a small section is taken from a larger image which is further cropped before being enlarged.  These images portray a section of a crowd watching a football match, or a bystander. As a result, those assembled to watch find themselves watched. The writer David Green sees this as an example of the on-going mutual fascination that exists between painters and photographers that has led artists to explore the boundaries of each medium,

 

‘Since the invention of photography (and more recently with the appearance of electronic and digital means of image-making) painting exists within an ‘expanded field’ and its own identity is irrevocably bound to the existence of these other technologies and to the undeniable impact they have had. However, to acknowledge the power and ubiquity of the photography in contemporary culture is not to cede to it a priority in the visual arts. As Stevens’ paintings demonstrate, one possible option for the painter is to directly confront the photograph, to interrogate it with the aim of contaminating this most apparently stable of objects.’

 

In reproducing these images the artist has faithfully retained their blurred or out-of-focus quality through a slow and painstaking application of paint, each stroke regularised in a semi-mechanical fashion, thus the actual painted surface further veiling the already ghostly traces of figures.

Work by this artist