Painter Stephen Westfall aspires for his paintings to be seen as expressions of energy and place. “I think a lot about the relationship between painting and architecture,” he says. “When I was an adolescent, I was fascinated by the social spaces adjudicated by architecture… As a student, I loved [sixties] American abstract painting because it seemed to address interior space with the same forthrightness that the architects I admired addressed exterior space. In my work, color as area became something to pay close attention to… Over the course of the last decade, I wanted my work to address architecture more directly and wall paintings seemed a way to fuse paintings to architectural scale. I regard the wall paintings now as being as essential to my artistic practice as my paintings on canvas and paper, which are bound by more conventional notions of portability and transferability.”
