User:Stephen Alcorn

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Stephen Alcorn (visual artist, born September 28, 1958)

While born in the U.S., Stephen Alcorn spent his formative years in Florence, Italy. It was there that he attended the Istituto Statale d’Arte, an experience that left an indelible impression upon him and infused his work with a passion for bold technical experimentation in a wide range of mediums. Mr. Alcorn’s work hangs in numerous private and permanent collections, both in the United States and in Europe. Major publishers throughout the world routinely employ his award winning portraiture and illustration, and his work has been the subject of numerous feature magazine articles appearing in Print, Graphis, U&LC, Linea Grafica, Grafica & Disegno, Prometeo, and Abitare. Mr. Alcorn’s books for young readers include Langston Hughes: An Illustrated Edition, which won the 1998 Carter G. Woodson Book Award, and I, Too Sing America: Three Centuries of African American Poetry, which was selected as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. Since 1986 Mr. Alcorn has lived and worked in the village of Cambridge, New York, with his wife, botanical artist Sabina Fascione Alcorn, and their two daughters. 1993 marked the opening to the general public of The Alcorn Studio & Gallery, a multifaceted workshop featuring rotating exhibits of both artists’ painting, printmaking, and publishing activities. 1998 marks the opening of their on-line gallery, located at www.alcorngallery.com.

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WORDS OF PRAISE: "Whether he's interpreting the face of a famous author like Solzhenitsyn, illustrating with impeccable skill and sharp irony a scene from Malraux's Man's Hope, or taking on an entire novel, such as Paul LaFarge's The Artist of the Missing, there's no question that Stephen Alcorn is one of our most technically sophisticated and inspired of artists. The sheer craftsmanship is breathtaking, revealing a kind of artistry that hasn't existed for half a century, nearly obsessed with clean lines, the interplay of light and dark, the myriad possibilities offered by a centimeter of space, a delight in structure, design and texture. But more than the technique is the imagination and visual acuity Alcorn brings to his subjects: playing with perspectives, jostling with angles, combining foreshortened, exterior scenes with larger, emotional interiors, setting our expectations on head so we look, and look again, and marvel. This is multi-dimensional work in the true sense of the term: layered, split-imaged, resonating with multiple--sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory--meanings, brilliantly executed, unfailingly interesting. Throughout his oeuvre Alcorn has lifted "the veil of familiarity," to use the phrase popularized by Wordsworth and Coleridge when stating the mission of the romantic poets. We see the world anew through his eyes, and remain, always, the richer for it." — John A. Glusman

               Vice President & Executive Editor, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

“It wasn’t an urge to play God that prompted Stephen Alcorn to reinvent the rooster, the cow, dog, owl, frog, tiger and even the Himalayan yak. It’s more a case of “the divine discontent of the truly creative mind” that bars him from repeating what has been done before. In his prints, with Medici-like indulgence, Alcorn has permitted himself every whim. The plates are saturated with texture, the borders are bursting with design themes and the animals themselves are invested with heroic and magical powers. The cow is capable of infinite pales of milk, the frog will turn into a prince momentarily, the valiant horse carries his knight to victory, the cat can cast spells and make sad princesses smile.” - Marion Muller from Stephen Alcorn Reinvents the Rooster U&LC, volume 16, number 3, summer 1989

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“We are reproducing Stephen Alcorn’s Ritratti degli Artisti Più Celebri, because we not only admire his unabashed hero-worship and the deep sentiment behind the project, but because we are completely bowled over by his artistry”. - Marion Muller Associate Editor, U&LC Journal from “Stephen Alcorn’s Ritratti degli Artisti Più Celebri”; feature article, U&LC Journal Volume 7, Number 4, December 1980

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“I’ve always thought of art as being the perfect marriage of things seen and things dreamed,” Stephen Alcorn recently observed towards the end of a long, thoughtful conversation about his work. “It’s that marriage of the way we see things in our imagination and the way we perceive them physically in nature that creates tension and dynamic. Where do you find the right meeting point? In portraiture, for example, you can think of an egg and embellish it and arrive at a portrait. And you can also see the actual head in all its detail, subtlety, and complexity and distill it and arrive at an egg. The key is finding the middle ground where there’s a degree of distillation and abstraction without forsaking the character traits that give the specific subject its individuality.” - Carol Stevens, Executive Editor, Print Magazine From Choice Cuts, a cover story on the art of Stephen Alcorn Print Magazine, January-February issue, 1994

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“Stephen Alcorn relishes the challenges inherent in the linocut print, pushing them and exploiting them to achieve effects that are truly ground breaking and uniquely his. Indeed, his investigation of the linocut medium has been a kind of odyssey in which each discovery has led to a new vision, and the territory to be explored is apparently boundless.” - Carol Steven Executive Editor, Print Magazine excerpt from the cover story entitled Choice Cuts: Stephen Alcorn’s favored technique is the linocut, thought by many to be an unsophisticated medium. But he has exploited it to brilliant and ground breaking effect. January-February, 1994; pg. 32-41

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Not since the Belgian master Frans Masereel (1889 - 1972) has an artist reached such elevated heights in the art of printmaking” — Daniele Baroni, Critic and Art Historian From the cover story entitled The Art of Stephen Alcorn Linea Grafica, Number 296; Pg. 10-19; Milano, Italy; 1995