Female

37

I am a professional artist and Bay Area native, living and working on the northern California coast near San Francisco. I exhibit my paintings in galleries and select venues around California, and am currently working to promote my work in art markets around the country and the world. For more information on my work, read my artist statement, and check out my website at www.ericasteiner.com.

Artist Statement:

My newest paintings find conceptual grounding in the idea that the basic human drive to decorate and adorn the material world is a fundamentally sacred or devotional one. Whether this impulse is made manifest in the form of an everyday act like putting on jewelry, or in an overt act of ritual (as in the act of adorning a religious icon with flower garlands), we as humans are ubiquitously driven to decorate our world, to sanctify it, and to beautify it with ornament.

Continually deferring and referring back to the language of nature, I use painting as a vehicle to explore my affinity for ornamentation, using natural elements such as trees, flowers, cells, and alien or marine-like forms. Highly detailed in oil and gold leaf, these elements function as visual building blocks of elaborate, dreamy, yet earth-bound realities, foreign yet viscerally familiar places where the consciousness can dwell and find new perspective.

Stylistically, my paintings are influenced by Chinese and Japanese landscape painting, contemporary graphics, textile design and art nouveau. The work also recalls a wide range of contemporary, folk and religious art, including traditional Indian and aboriginal painting, Tibetan Buddhist textiles, and medieval Catholic illuminations.