Stephen Alcorn is making some mighty cool prints. Simply said, and simply, you know once you see his work that I am speaking the truth. He is a master printmaker who is making eloquent portraits of authors, artists and images from classic novels. Images that illustrate "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", or the death of Julius Caesar are filled with elegant lines and are compositionally rock solid. Alcorn knows how best to utilize his characters within the prescribed space. He wants to, and does, create a heightened sense of drama from his stories.
His portrait series descriptively takes their source from other media, but he makes them uniquely his own, filling them with light and graceful lines. In a way, some of them remind me of the fractured Cubist works of Picasso or Fernand Leger. Also, thrown in for good measure, are the bold linear references his work lends itself to German Expressionists like Schmidt-Rotloff or Erich Heckel. Alcorn's literary referenced images are mini-stories in and of themselves. The multi-leveled aspect of his compositions yield to the different planes of story-telling and different parts of the overall novel. They are beautifully handled in terms of his balancing of black and white sections, and what he leaves out of the story isn't necessary to describe. We are left with the whole picture, the whole story, and we want for nothing else.
Bio:
The American born artist spent his formative years in Florence, Italy where he developed an appreciation for medieval and Italian renaissance style works. He returned to the United States to study art in Purchase, NY, and at the Cooper Union School after completing his studies at the Istituto Statale d’Arte, in Florence. While in Italy he apprenticed with Master Artisans Paolo Tarchiani and Roberta Cioni in various printmaking and book-binding classes, plus art history and philosophy.
He also worked with several Florentine printers and bookbinders where his projects included printing limited editioned prints created by 20th century Italian artists Marino Marini, Giorgio Morandi, Lorenzo Viani, Pietro Parigi amongst others.
Since 1986 Alcorn has lived and worked in Cambridge, New York. His ‘Alcorn Studio & Gallery’ has been the focus of numerous feature articles appearing in such prestigious magazine as Print, Graphis, U&LC, Linea Grafica, Prometeo, and Abitare.
Education:
1978—80 BFA, The State University of New York, Purchase, NY
1977—78 The Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Arts, New York, NY
1971—77 Instituto Statale d'Arte, Florence, Italy
Public Collections:
The Gutenberg Museum, Magonza, Germany
The Library of Congress, Washington, DC
The New York Public Library, New York, NY
Random House, New York, NY
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
University of Connecticut at Storrs, CT
The Washington Post Co., Washington, DC
Plus numerous private collections in Europe and the United States.
Picture of Stephen Alcorn rolling up an image.
No comments:
Post a Comment