A Classic Review of Stephen Dent’s Top 4 Paintings

A Classic Review of Stephen Dent’s Top 4 Paintings

#1

Stephen Dent is a painter with a knack for providing us some really great imagery. I especially love his 2011 piece which is oil on canvas and called Aircraft # 2. The painting is blurry but perhaps that is the point? Many times when men are at war they get blurry vision, when they do battle, perhaps this is an ode to that? The fog of war so to speak. If not, the artist may be trying to portray movement, which would explain the ripple effect tin the propellers of the aircraft. It can be found here at: http://stephendent.info/projects/night-vision/#jp-carousel-707. Moving on…

#2

The next Stephen Dent piece I would like to review is what looks like a small girl wearing a white winter coat and a gasmask?! This is truly a strange sight. It reminds me of a scene from something like the Berlin Wall and a girl having to don a gas mask if the results of the Cold War had been different. What could be happening in the painting that makes a young girl don a gas mask? It has to be war. This artwork can be found here: http://stephendent.info/projects/misc-2008-2012/#jp-carousel-674.

#3

Lake Pippin is a very unique painting. It looks like a boy fishing at a lake with his dad. The off-putting part of the piece is that the bottom is faded and the top becomes clearer. Where the lake meets the boys head causes this effect to happen because the Lake is colored light blue. The father looks like Conan O Brian. Find it here: http://stephendent.info/projects/recollections/#jp-carousel-389.

Some background on this particular piece of artwork: Lake Pippin is part of the Recollections series. According to the painter: “Recollections is a series of works which began in 2007 and continues through today. The work is an examination of my personal memories and their relationship to photography, more specifically, the family snapshot.” Dent also says that “In examining family snapshots from my childhood I began to realize how the memories of my life are in many ways the memories of specific images. The iconic image from the family photo album is much more vivid in my mind than the actual details of specific events. The documentation of an event, place or time, supersedes or displaces the recollection of the actual event, place or time.” Beautiful words. Perhaps he is a writer as well?

#4

I had to choose a realism piece to add to this list of great paintings. In my writing classes I came across the Realism movement in American Literature but now I get to look at paintings representing this same type of idea. The Stephen Dent painting that best represents this theme was the San Juan with charcoal on Paper, 2006. Now this is supposed to be a painting of islands but to me the piece looks like the crags of a lava volcano, it’s really quite exquisite in a rough sort of way. How the artist blended charcoal and bare paper together to bring forth to life such a poignant location is beyond me. Stephen Dent really has some skill.