Stephen Fessler

Biography

When something has captured my attention (I call this an instance of “directed perception”), it stands isolated in my visual memory to the exclusion of everything else. These are often things or scenes glimpsed in passing, and I will turn and retrace my steps, or brake and turn the car around, struck by some unexpected elegance. Often, the precise aspect of the thing seen that has caused me such excitement will remain mysterious to me until I have begun to paint. This is, partly, why I feel driven to paint it. The other reason is so that others may share in my appreciation of these naturally-occurring compositions, and to that end I present only the thing I’ve seen and loved at first sight, leaving out all indications of its location and environment. In this way, too, I remain true to my initial experience of directed perception. My paintings, paradoxically enough, are not “about” the objects depicted, despite being shaped and painted so as to resemble those objects. I have no particular interest in barns, propane tanks, road signs, or the other things which serve as vehicles for these found compositions.

And so, the paintings themselves present their own paradoxes, using trompe-l’oeil techniques to give the illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface; the paintings’ unusual shapes emphasize their existence as objects in their own right, but these objects seem to consist of one plane only, having no thickness, constructed so as to “float” just in front of the wall.