Allan Stephenson

"I apply myself to a traditional subject, the landscape, and to a traditional approach to rendering that landscape."

An admitted traditionalist, Stephenson is not trying to break any new ground with his art. His goals focus on revealing the poeticism of trees, the beauty that man and nature may form in cooperation, and the serendipity that can result from fortuitous accidents upon the surface of the paper or the canvas.

Much of Stephenson's work has been done in oils, but he prefers to work in pastel because of its direct, "hands-on" quality. He sculpts and blends pigments to create lively textures in his images.

Stephenson's imagery is of the places he has been lucky enough to visit. He does not paint plein air, but instead, tries to make an almost symbolic representation of a place. His aims are the continuation of a certain kind of painting that has a mystical vein within it attached to the land. He hopes that by this art, he can give both the viewer and himself some escape from the frenetic world we all sometimes find ourselves in.