Steve Armes

Steve Armes was born in 1958 and took an early interest in art. He was fascinated by the illustrators of the Golden Age. When he began his formal study of art in college at San Jose State University, he hoped to learn to paint like the old masters. He was disillusioned by the trend to promote avant-garde art and the disparagement of traditional painting. He found a teacher who went against the grain and taught the fundamentals of art as practiced for four centuries. His name was Maynard Dixon Stewart, and he was trained by Frank Vincent DuMond who studied in Paris in the nineteenth century and was a friend of Whistler, Sargent and William Merritt Chase. From Stewart, Armes learned the tenants of academic painting and derived a love for painting the landscape.

Armes learned the way that eighteenth and nineteenth century landscape painters would work directly from nature, doing small oil color sketches on location to use as the basis for creating larger, more definitive paintings in the studio. He also came to understand that simply copying a photograph would never produce the kind of natural representation of nature that has been the goal of the great landscapists he admires.

Through many years of study from nature and studio work, Armes has realized his goal of creating paintings which are both simple but stunning in their presentation of the beauty that he sees around him. He is quickly becoming recognized as one of America’s important painters.

Mr. Armes is a part of Triad, a group of three American painters (www.triad-threeamericanpainters.com) pursuing traditional art. Their inaugural museum show was September 9-October 28 at the Newington-Cropsey, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. It was followed by a show in the Summer of 2007 at David Dike Fine Art in Dallas, Tx. They have been invited to exhibit again at The Newington-Cropsey in fall of 2010.