Stephen Horne, “Beach Road, Ocracoke”

Stephen Horne is an artist who has made his home in the Northern Adirondacks for over 30 years. Yet Horne, like many American landscapists before him, has sought to explore the color, light, and texture of locations far away from his home.

The View Arts Center in Old Forge, New York, is the happy host of “Near & Far,” a solo exhibition of magnetic landscapes by artist Stephen Horne. As the show’s title suggests, the exhibition showcases a number of Horne’s works created both near and far from his home in New York state.

According to the gallery, “Horne’s visual wanderings have taken him to the pastoral farm fields of Central New York, the rocky sea coast of Nova Scotia and wind-swept, sandy Florida dunes. In each, Horne has discovered a new palette and a refreshing view of what it means to ‘see.’

Stephen Horne, “St. Regis River”

“After a forty-year career as an editorial cartoonist, illustrator and museum exhibit designer, Stephen Horne has returned to paints and canvas, with an eye to landscapes here at home, and far away on distant coastlines. Working in acrylic and oil, Horne has spent the last few years exploring these worlds, marveling at the forest floors on trails near his home in Paul Smiths, NY, to be then stunned, on vacation, by the roiling seascapes of Nova Scotia and beach dunes and sunsets of Florida.”

Stephen Horne, “Central New York Hedgerow”

The artist added, “The dense Forest Preserve out my back door forces me to see a landscape of detail, within a few feet, full of the rich greens and browns of the Northern Boreal forest. So, when I travel to the coast — Cape Breton, Ocracoke, North Carolina, or Sanibel Island, Florida, in particular — I am amazed by a world of practically endless horizons, barren of trees, blasted by wind or lit by an entirely different sunlight. I ricochet between the two worlds in my paintings, and am happy for it.” 

“Near & Far” opened on November 24 and continues through March 17, 2018. To learn more, visit the View Arts Center.

 This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.


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Andrew Webster is the former Editor of Fine Art Today and worked as an editorial and creative marketing assistant for Streamline Publishing. Andrew graduated from The University of North Carolina at Asheville with a B.A. in Art History and Ceramics. He then moved on to the University of Oregon, where he completed an M.A. in Art History. Studying under scholar Kathleen Nicholson, he completed a thesis project that investigated the peculiar practice of embedded self-portraiture within Christian imagery during the 15th and early 16th centuries in Italy.

2 COMMENTS

  1. I never cease to wonder at the vast ambition and achievement of a painter of such technical gifts and perceptual acuity as Stephen Horne because it would seem impossible to bring the boreal forest to a two-dimensional plane, much less the vast horizons of Cape Breton, and all the more impossible to be so masterful in tackling two such divergent locales. Yet he more than manages – he reveals, in these superb colors and honest, honest draughtsmanship, the deeper beauties of landscapes that have defied so many artists before him. A bravura performance by a huge talent.
    Charles Riley
    Director, Nassau County Museum of Art

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