Stephen Yates - Artist Statement

 

These paintings are based on a theme that has been recurrent in my work for many years: they suggest forms moving through various atmospheres. In some pieces the layered brushstrokes describe a sense of light moving through a vibrant sea, while in others a few simple shapes drift in a color-suffused, mysterious space. Forms may sway in underwater currents or undulate with wind across landscapes or flicker with reflected light as they dart through darkness. A sense of prismatic color, energy, movement and passage of time are all part of these paintings. They are intentionally non-specific in terms of recognizable images, but create a specific sense of place and experience.

Jake Seniuk, Director of the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center says of Yates:

The impulse towards gesture wrestles with the eye’s powers of observation in the expressionistic canvases of Stephen Yates. Yates has long plumbed layered spaces, freely floating expressive doodles and gee haws over feathery backdrops in which soft images of shoreline and underwater gardens are dissolved. His playful games of free-association give these internal landscapes a sense of existing in elastic time. Yates’s canvases are charged fields where matter and energy are in a state of constant flux, moving from one state to another.


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