Winslow Garage

Stephanie Stein
Recent Landscapes: Orienting Our Interiority into the Exterior World

Stephanie Stein is an artist who grew up in NYC in the 1970’s looking at the Great Chinese Landscape paintings in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and reading stories of arctic adventures and tall ships sailing into the open sea. In her most recent work, she presents a selection of shan shui (“mountain water”) paintings rendered in ethereal blue and white tones and reigned in by a faint grid system or displaying some barely visible type of registration mark. These navigation tools are orienteering points for entering Stein’s imagined landscapes. Assessing the sublime from across vast distances, the artist paints “to feel what it would be like in that place.”

Oddly reminiscent of the great lonely spaces found in early 18th century painting, these works serve as escapes into an untouched natural world and simultaneously act as reminders that the natural world may no longer be able to provide us sanctuary from the failure of human order.

These are beautiful paintings: beautifully rendered, beautifully contemplated and not to be missed.

Stein has a BFA in Printmaking from the Philadelphia College of Art, studied at Temple University Rome, and is currently pursuing a Masters of Human Development at Pacific Oaks College. Stein has traveled throughout Europe and North Africa and shows her work in New York and Los Angeles.