Shine Season | New works in oil by Steve Coffey

With strong prairie roots I've the deepest respect with gratitude to the First Peoples of the great plains, past and present. This patch of Mother Earth fills my senses and fuels my attempts at reflecting it's powerful light, shimmer and rhythm in paint.
I was first trained as a sculptor with a leaning toward formalism and abstraction but in the end my voice wasn't being fully realized in that three dimensional world. So, by way of my love for drawing of the figure and landscape to my attraction to colour and gesture I made the leap to oil paint in 1995.

My paintings are mental snapshots. I don't paint from photographs and I seldom paint plein-air. Essentially I gather what strikes me, file it away in my head and draw on it in my studio. These mental files I call ‘Memory Polaroids’ of which I think of as a mingling of what's around me with a subconscious inkling of perception of what was, similar to the otherworldly quality of a polaroid picture. This process offers me the freedom to step outside a more traditional palette into what I consider to be the real nature's abstraction.

I'm a storyteller. I'm a self taught musician and singer songwriter and music is in my blood. I was literally raised with it penetrating my walls next to my father's rehearsal space. I consider my music to simply be an extension of my paint palette. I only practice it with different tools. I consider poetry and melody as tubes of paint as are the collaborating musicians that texturize, nuance and spark my music canvas. As with paint and it's each individual personality I am also drawn to the walking breathing versions. Artists in their own right using me equally as a hue for their own brush. We have forged lasting friendships over the years and I am grateful.
The reverse can also be said regarding music and visual art: melody and poetry inform my canvas and often I'll replace the language of visual art with that of music composition. For me, a painting with rhythm, tempo, swells, beats, harmony, verse, chorus and crescendo have a much higher likelihood of succeeding in the theatre of optics. And why not? The ear and the eye are close neighbours.     

In the end I would hope that my work triggers the feeling of familiarity, that somewhere at sometime the viewer has seen or felt this; a familiar mystery that lives on the tip of the tongue. I would hope that my work is accessible for simply what it is; a painting or song left to interpretation with no tricks.

If you haven't had the opportunity to view it yet, here's an insightful interview featuring Steve in 2023: