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About the Artist
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Jim Stevenson, a native of Texas, received a BFA from Sam Houston State University and
studied at the New York Academy of Art and with noted figurative painter Greg Decker. Jim
lived in New York City for 10 years and now lives in Rhinebeck, NY, where he draws
inspiration from the scenery and people of the beautiful Hudson Valley.
Jim is an oil painter of landscapes, animals, people, and abstracts. His work
fuses traditional methods with contemporary perception. Constantly delighted by the forms
of nature and the human figure, his work is a crystallization of these experiences. Jim
describes his work as a search for the beauty and mystery of the everyday world.
Jim works with recognizable imagery – landscape, portrait, still-life – but
his work is more abstract than it might at first appear. Composition and color
relationships occupy much of his thought process while painting. While the old masters
and 19th century European artists are a significant and obvious source of inspiration, he
also draws significantly on the lessons of the post-impressionists, early modernists and
abstract expressionists. The nuances of color passages and color spaces hold a particular
fascination for Jim, and provide an endless field for exploration in the seemingly simple
spaces of his paintings.
In the words of Greg Decker:
"Seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary.... Often repeated as a truism in painting --
but in the work of Jim Stevenson this simple maxim takes on richness, subtlety and
power.
Jim is a painter of the everyday: cows in a field, a family of pears, discarded objects;
but he is not an everyday painter. The drawing is solid and searching, the coloration
sensual and luminous. Even odd at times, the color: a complicity of mute purples, smoky
greens and earth yellows carefully built up into luminous form. In the landscapes of the
last two years there is a sense of the primal and the mystic in the light and the land.
(After all, he does paint in the Hudson Valley)."
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Exhibitions
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2012
Art Studio Views
Studio 26, Red Hook, NY
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2011
Montgomery Row, Rhinebeck, NY
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2010
Rage, Kingston, NY
Gazen Gallery Group Show, Rhinebeck, NY
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2009
Montgomery Row, Rhinebeck, NY
Art Studio Views
"Art at Grasmere" Group Show, Rhinebeck, NY
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2008
Art Studio Views
G.A.S. Gallery Group Show, Poughkeepsie, NY
Panoply, Rhinebeck, NY
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2007
Hudson Art Walk, Hudson, NY
Tivoli Artists Co-Op, Tivoli, NY
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1998
DANO, New York City
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1995
Local Color Gallery, College Station, TX
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1992-93
Aspiring Eye Gallery, Huntsville, TX
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Education
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Greg Decker, Master Figurative Artist
Studio assistant, individual instruction
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New York Academy of Art, New York, NY
Classes in classical drawing and figure painting
practices
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Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX
BFA 1993, with Honors
Harry Ahysen/Art Endowment Scholarship
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Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
Studies in Architecture, English and Engineering
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