Stephen Wright: Beach Break

Billis Williams Gallery is pleased to present Stephen Wright: Beach Break, the second solo show of the Los Angeles-based artist’s oil paintings.  This show features Wright's most recent paintings of waterscapes and continues through June 3rd.

Avoiding impressionistic & photorealist styles, Stephen Wright’s ocean series captures fleeting moments with a point-of-view both personal and fragmentary. Wright is well known for his large scale figurative paintings and this new body of work is a radical departure for the artist.  After years of exploring different objects in his work, Wright found a subject that truly spoke to him.  

Growing up in Southern California, the Pacific was an omnipresent part of Wright’s life and when he turned to it as subject matter for paintings, he found a worthy challenge in the attempt to capture its essence.  Wright writes, “Water does not have a form; it adapts to forms created by energy.  There is something kind of futile yet exciting about capturing the effect of water in a painting.  There is no start or end point, just a fragment of an experience contained within a square or rectangle.”

Wright was born and grew up in Los Angeles and received his BFA from California State University Long Beach.  He has exhibited throughout the US and his work has appeared in Fine Art Connoisserur, Luxe Magazine, New American Painting, Poets & Artists, American Art Collector, The New York Post, and ARTNews.  His work appears in numerous private collections internationally.  He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.