Stephen Maine

Stephen Maine is an American abstract painter, writer, curator and teacher. He is a member of the American Abstract Artists and a contributing editor at Artcritical.com. His paintings engage and extend contemporary ideas about color, composition, surface and process. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
In a process closely akin to relief printmaking, Maine uses textured surfaces to apply fluid acrylic paint indirectly to prepared canvas. He makes these surfaces or “plates,” some of which are quite large, out of common materials such as plywood, extruded foam, plastic and glue. Maine rolls or brushes wet paint over the plate and presses it into the canvas, using custom built contraptions to ensure alignment (registration) of successive applications. Integral to the process is the idea that the entire surface is treated with paint at the same moment.
Color itself, and the material properties of paint as embodied color, provide Maine with his primary inspiration. His open-ended and intentionally imprecise production methods yield results that cannot accurately be foreseen, and he delights in the element of surprise they bring to his studio activity.
Stephen Maine has exhibited extensively. His work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions in New York, and group exhibitions throughout the United States as well as in Europe and Mexico.
Work by Maine is included in the permanent collections of several important institutions, including that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art Library Special Collection, the Whitney Museum of Art Frances Mulhall Achilles Library, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Yale Univers

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