Stephen Duren: A Life of Painting Exhibition Reception

Thursday, September 14, 2023
4:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.
Allendale Campus
Alumni, Community, Faculty, Staff, Students

Stephen Duren, Self, 1995, Oil on canvas, Collection of the Artist

Stephen Duren was born in 1948 in Fairfield, a community set amidst the Coastal Ranges of California and located halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento. Growing up he would spend time on his grandfather’s ranch in nearby Vacaville, slowly being wooed by the light and landscape of the foothills. His time alone with the land would prove to be both formative and foundational in his approach to art and life. It drove him to paint outdoors, to seek solace from loneliness in nature, and to filter much of his painting through the land and amber light of Northern California.

At age 14, inspired by his uncle’s artwork that hung on the walls of his grandfather’s home, Duren began to paint and has never stopped. After high school he joined the Navy, serving a four-year tour and eventually becoming a staff artist and broadcast journalist. He returned home in 1972 and completed degrees at the San Francisco Art Institute and Sacramento State University, often eschewing the classroom and instruction for the outdoors. In 1978 he moved to West Michigan and began teaching, an endeavor that lasted six years before the lure of full-time painting drew him back into the field.

Sixty years have passed since Duren first took up a paintbrush. During this time, his work has experienced a push and pull between realism and abstraction, resulting in an evolving stylistic approach. Some of his works are direct renderings of nature from his experience painting plein-air (outdoors), while others are reductions of natural and artificial spaces into forms, lines, and colors. Stephen Duren: A Life of Painting, explores this evolution, his extensive career, and his deep connection to the landscape in California, Michigan, and abroad. Organized by the Grand Valley State University Art Gallery and hosted concurrently with the Dennos Museum Center, the exhibition draws from several public and private collections. Between both venues, the exhibition consists of over 90 works of art, including landscapes, abstractions, self-portraits, still lifes, allegories, sketches, prints, and plein-air pieces.

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Location Information

GVSU Art Gallery
Thomas J. and Marcia J. Haas Center for Performing Arts

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Contact Information

[email protected]

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This event was added to the calendar by Kristen Krueger-Corrado (kruegekr@gvsu.edu) on Thursday, August 3, 2023 and was last updated on Friday, August 11, 2023 at 4:32 p.m.