Chateau Noir, Study of a Cezanne Landscape

Follow

Stephen Remick, an American painter,  grew up in Vermont and lives in Dartmouth, a small town on the south coast of Massachusetts. He received an AS in architecture from Vermont Technical College, and a BFA in Painting from Swain School of Design in New Bedford, Massachusetts where he met his wife, Anne Carrozza, also a painting major. They raised two kids (now adults) while Steve ran a small house painting business.
Steve mostly paints landscapes, representational and abstract. After a years' long series of abstract color-field paintings inspired by the edges where air and land meet, he changed course. “I’m attracted to items built or left by others that weren’t intended to be objects to contemplate. I want to be to art what Robert Frost is to poetry”. This led to a series inspired by the Robert Frost poem Mending Wall where he painted old stone walls in the middle of the woods off his New England backyard, now not walling anything in or out. Then, branching off to abandoned cellar holes and cemeteries, woodpiles, surveyor’s ribbon, backyard projects, and so on. In searching for subjects, he found that snow-cover unified and distilled them. This led to painting the abstract beauty of sunlight and shadow on snow, yet rendering it in a representational image. As a result, new paths opened up for him, including painting paths with the metaphors they evoke.
Saying he would never have thought they'd enter his studio, world events and politics make their way into his subject matter once in a while, like his 2020 COVID-19 healthcare worker portrait series. "I hope to give empathy and understanding to whatever subject is on my canvas."