Stephen Paré is an artist and writer originally from Ithaca, New York, who has lived across the United States. Now based in Houston, Texas, Stephen feels at home wherever his creativity takes him. Inspired by the art, stories, and music he’s loved, as well as the deep cultures and nuances of language, Stephen’s work aims for what James Joyce once called an “omnium gatherum” — a full representation of life, both profound and ironic.

Working primarily through computers and mobile devices, Stephen's art is deeply influenced by the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on history, anthropology, and the cultural richness of the past. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions across Italy, including Rome, Milan, Venice, and Madrid, and he will exhibit in New York in August 2024.

We asked Stephen about his art, creative process, and inspirations.

*We Went to Meet the Famous Old Woman of Malamocco...*

What inspires your art? Are there any particular themes or subjects that you enjoy exploring through your artwork?

What inspires me:

Art that I’ve loved, stories that I’ve loved, and music that I’ve loved.

History and anthropology.

Posture and gesture.

Deep culture.

I’m aiming for what James Joyce called an “omnium gatherum,” his ironic way of saying that he wanted his work to have all of life presented and represented (irony is unavoidable, it seems to me, if you’re going to claim that kind of goal - or, come to think of it, that’s especially so if an artist is going to start referencing James Joyce…).

You might say that my default mode is irony; and since at some point I discovered that there are other vantage points from which to view the world, I place a high value on making artwork that is NOT ironic. I am interested in deep culture, in the way that Joyce was - not just what we say but the words we use, and even how we pronounce them.

I do have an artistic model, who has continued to inspire me since I first encountered his work as a teenager: Paul Klee, the visual storyteller and supreme ironist for whom titles are essential, and for whom there is no bright line dividing the abstract and the figurative; a pattern of colored blocks becomes the portal of a city, its era and culture indeterminate - and the hint that it is that rather than merely an “orderly arrangement of forms and colors” sometimes comes from the artist’s title alone. It was from him that I learned the attraction of invented cultures, the possible suggestion in an artwork of culture itself as a subject.

You're also a writer — what kind of an impact do you think writing has on your art practice?

My writing and my visual art are closely joined - in fact it would be truer to say that the visual art impacts the writing, rather than the other way around, since a writing piece virtually always follows from an artwork. I think of myself as a storyteller; but it is when I create an image that my storytelling imagination is stimulated.

But the order that they come in is less important than the fact that they are joined; the storytelling part of the process might sometimes stop at a title, but it will be at least a title that evokes the suggestion of a wider world, of a culture. Sometimes I expand titles into flash fictions, and some of those become longer written stories. The titles and stories are descriptions of the images that they belong to – though they are more than that, too.

Can you tell us about your background as a digital artist? How did you get started in this field?

This sort of question is always answerable in several ways - none of them satisfactory. I could start with “quite by accident”; or “I once long ago saw a collection of Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs that I fell in love with but that also gave me the conviction that I could do as he had done”; or “by chance without expecting it I was given my first digital camera and at that time in my life had time to get outside and walk around taking pictures of everything”; or, indeed, “truthfully, it was the day that I started my Instagram account”; or even “I don’t really remember”.

There is some truth in all of those. But I think that the important thing is not how I began, but rather how I have persisted, how I rebuilt my life in order to devote my life to art every day. That part of my story, while important to me, is not very interesting to tell, I’m afraid. In the end it is only an account of how I solved my own quotidian and mundane equation, balancing money, work, time, and relationships in order to devote myself to my calling; and while every artist finds a different formula for that, I doubt that such information is of any real interest, even to other artists. What IS interesting is the work.

Like most artists I have a ground need to make art, and everything else follows from that.

What does your creative process look like? How do you approach brainstorming and conceptualizing ideas?

Most often, it looks like me lying on my back on a sofa or a bed, tapping and sliding my fingers on an iPad screen. I also work sitting at a desktop computer on occasion, but the largest share of my work is done on mobile devices.

I would not use the word “brainstorming” for what I do, because for me working on an artwork is action not pondering; or at any rate any pondering I do is while looking at the image that I’m making, opening myself up to it, letting a story make itself known.

Nor do I think that “conceptualizing” fits me very well. To be sure, I’m interested in ideas; but they emerge out of image-making rather than the other way around. Something Cartier-Bresson once said comes to mind, though I have to paraphrase it - something like, get the geometry right and the content takes care of itself. There’s something simple and profound about that thought: create visual relationships, and you will be creating meaning of other kinds, too.

The image comes first for me, the relationships of form and the energies that they represent; and from them the ideas follow. Actually I would prefer to say that the stories follow; ideas are more interesting when they are a layer in the cultural depth of a piece, and less interesting when they are illustrated by the piece. My art does not promote ideas, or only incidentally to “the art itself”. An idea is most welcome when there is the sense that there is a character speaking it; you could say that the character (and their speaking) is more interesting to me than the idea.

Can you tell us about some of your favorite pieces? What makes them special to you?

As Orson Welles once said, my favorite one is the next one. But that isn’t much of an answer, I know.

I’ll tell you about a piece that matters to me in more than one way; that’s not the same as it being a favorite, though I do have a great affection for it. Its title has changed several times, though the story has been constant. Its first title was ‘Yiannu Saved from Drowning’, referencing the Renoir film a little too closely; more recently I’ve been entitling it ‘Miraculous Rescue of Yiannu’.

The image is based on a bit of graffiti I found in 2022 on a wall in Rome (the graffiti there have been a rich source of material for me, incidentally). Turning it on its side and putting it through various formal transformations, blending it at an early stage with another Roman graffito, and replacing most of the colors gave me the rather abstracted outline of a man mostly submerged in a dark ocean, his limbs flailing. “Yiannu” is a fanciful alteration of the name of a close friend of mine, a man who in fact was once miraculously rescued at night by a fishing boat in the Aegean Sea.

As for upcoming projects, I have a number of them in mind, some quite ambitious, in which my storytelling and picture-making are fused in a video. Perhaps, if I can pull off one or two of them, even people who know my work already will be surprised.

You often work with gold. What does that color represent in your work?

I would not mind if it were more often. Metallic colors - I love copper and silver, too - confer some of that quality of “glowing from within” that a computer screen has, which is so marvelous to me - and is a key element and aim of my work in general. I won’t flatter myself by claiming that my work evokes wonder - but it does for me, at least; and metallic colors are one of the many things that I use to take an image beyond ordinary into that heightened world where wonder is the normal response.

Metallic colors have cultural associations that I’m very interested in. They give to a picture one of those qualities of a precious object, and all the associations of ancientness and myth-making - of cultural depth - that I value so highly in my work.

What is a dream project you’d like to make one day?

‘Orpheus’ as a video project. In some respects that project is already quite advanced, with numerous assets developed. I’ve composed about 18 minutes of music for it, translated Rilke’s poem, and laid the translated text into the audio recording. At various points I’ve generated images for it, but I’ve never been very satisfied with them.

Have there been any surprising or memorable responses to your work?

One surprising response more than any others: the first time that I sold a piece, and the buyer actually paid the sum that I asked for. No doubt other memorable responses will happen, but I doubt that any will surpass that one.