West Napa Afternoon Print

THE ART OF STEVEN GORDON I started drawing at a young age and with encouragement from my teachers and family, pursued a future as an artist. After high school, I enrolled in the University of Wisconsin, Madison where I received a Bachelors degree in Art in 1973. I went on to graduate study at Washington University in St. Louis and received my Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting in 1976. I originally took artistic inspiration from my local surroundings, painting everyday objects, people and street scenes. My photo-realistic paintings expressed my perspective; how things look to me, the color and the light of a commonplace scene. In 1977, I travelled west to settle in the Napa Valley but before being able to open my own studio and gallery, I started a job with Domaine Chandon winery. I had yearly showings of my work at the winery selling my work to customers and staff who fell in love with my work. These shows enabled my wife and I to travel annually to Europe for a month to study various museum and gallery collections and have a generally wonderful time exploring and seeing the sights. Certain insights were gained during these travels, but it is the unique character of the landscape of California that encouraged my artistic development, transforming my imagery into a personal translation of the natural environment around me. My paintings are an attempt to translate the dynamic, lyrical, real and abstract qualities of our environment that I observe in the unending variety of shapes, colors and textures I find in the landscape. After a number of years of showing and selling my work in galleries across the country, I opened my own space, The Gordon Gallery, in Yountville in the heart of Napa Valley in 1996. For 15 plus years this combined public gallery and studio space offered my oil and pastel paintings and limited edition giclée prints and gave the public the opportunity to view both completed paintings and works in progress. My pastel and oil paintings have been exhibited in galleries from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Chicago and New York. My work has also been shown at the Members’ Galleries of the Philadelphia and Delaware Art Museums, the Oakland Museum and at the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo, New York. My pastel and oil paintings are represented in private and corporate collections worldwide and have been exhibited in numerous one-person and group shows.