Brian Keith Stephens
Dancing in the divebar

Name: Dancing in the divebar
Brand: Brian Keith Stephens
Price: 25178.28 AUD
Availability: InStock

$16,000

£12,286.46

€14,094.51

CA$22,481.88

A$25,178.28

CHF 13,137.62

MX$307,541.91

NOK 167,148.71

SEK 157,557.69

DKK 105,185.58

About the Item

As we navigating our daily lives, we must face thoughts, anxieties, joys and emotions from all three of these tenses, and often at the same time. Seemingly opposite emotions -- lust, hatred, desire, love, pride, inhibition -- exists simultaneously between these moments in time. For some of us, some emotions outweigh others, grabbing our attention and transfixing our minds, sometimes taking over the way we live and breathe. For myself, the emotions that occupy my mind and capture my energy are that of love, desire, and the fear of hurt or disappointment. And so, at the center of my work are these forceful emotions--they guide my hand to paint and my heart and mind to live. My work explores the emotions that guide us, that pull us and push is and ultimately define who we are, in relation to others and to ourselves. Lately, what I have been most interested in capturing is how alternative perceptions of one’s identity can change the effect these daily emotions. My work speaks to this in two mediums: oil paintings and collage/installation. With the first medium, I do this primarily through mystical imagery juxtaposed with figurative technique. I am using oil paints to create this mystical alter-reality where the human is the animal and the animal is the human. Growing up in Connecticut, I have always found animals as a vessel for depicting human emotion; I believe in many ways animals are capable of expressing human emotions is a way that is both understandable and mysterious and alluring. Like animals, we are all wild and fearful, but unlike animals, we have to live in this world of rules and normativity. My desires, my emotions, are not always able to fit in the place and society I live, but in my art, I can find a place for those outliers to join forces. I am captivated by the power of my own emotions, the playful desires and the sometimes dangerous energy that is the essence of the human spirit. We love, we hurt, we laugh and we cry -- it’s this fantastic and sometimes frightful spectrum. The ‘contemporary soldier’, a motif represented in my work through oil on canvas, is my own conception of this power we have to love and to hurt, to build and to break. For me the contemporary soldier is child freed from the gaze of the parent or society, it is the spirit, freed. But also faced with the challenge of the future, even as it moves freely from its past.

Creator:
Brian Keith Stephens (1973, American)
Dimensions:
Height: 40 in (101.6 cm)Width: 50 in (127 cm)
Medium:
Cotton Canvas,Wax,Oil
Period:
2010-
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Boston, MA
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU2629215364342

Cotton Canvas, Wax, Oil

Brian Keith Stephens
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Cotton Canvas, Oil

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