Artist: Steven Lester

Year Completed: 2020

Medium: Acrylic on gallery wrapped canvas

Dimensions in Inches (HxWxD): * 36 x 36 x 2

Shipping from: US

About the Artist:
I consider myself a contemporary, narrative artist. As American filmmaker, George Lucas said, "Narrative is one of the oldest and most important impulses in art. It is also the most popular form of art. Tracing the arc of narrative art reveals how culture is created, reinforced, and then compelled to evolve."

It is not that I simply want to document a story arc, but to celebrate the power of visual storytelling through expressionist painting. I see with my heart and I paint with my hands, but I always desire to provoke fascination, imagination and wonder. To that end, my loose, expressive style allows me to interpret the emotion and movement of the moment. What's my objective? To create art that engages the human heart and challenges the spirit to hone my craft in such a way as to resonate on an emotional, visceral level. My paintings and collages are marked by bold colors, expressive brushwork often mixing media and incorporating collage elements and a variety of mark-making tools.

My subjects are informed by the aggregate of my varied life experiences. You will note that much of my work is sports themed. That is not because I am a jock or have an interest in star power. Frankly, there is a lot in the sports world that is repulsive to me (the scandals, the privilege, gender inequality, and the ridiculous salaries to name a few). But there is also a transcendent dimension of sports, an innate drama and what Olympian Jesse Owens called, the athlete's "inner life"- the mysterious source of the drive, deeper than the one to win, to excel until improbable dreams are fulfilled. I have found sports to be a good staging ground to paint colorful narratives through a compelling point of view.

Additional Information:

Jim Thorpe: Native American Son

He was a Sac and Fox Indian from the Oklahoma frontier, orphaned as a teenager and raised as a ward of government schools.

Thorpe began the Olympics by crushing the field in the now-defunct pentathlon, which consisted of five events in a single day. He placed first in four of them, dusting his competition in the 1,500-meter run by almost five seconds. A week later the three-day decathlon competition began in a pouring rain. Thorpe opened the event by splashing down the track in the 100-meter dash in 11.2 seconds-a time not equaled at the Olympics until 1948. On the second day, his shoes were stolen. Luckily, Jim ended up finding two unmatched shoes in a garbage can. One of the shoes was too big, so he had to wear an extra sock. Even wearing these shoes, Jim won two gold medals that day.

The Associated Press was him voted "The Greatest Athlete of the First Half of the Century" Yet, in one of the great sports injustices in history, the International Olympic Committee stripped Thorpe of his medals, citing that his participation in minor league baseball disqualified his amateur status.

It was not until almost 30 years after Thorpe's death. In 1982, that IOC finally agreed to restore Thorpe's gold medals.

Shipping: Price includes shipping to buyers in the U.S. If buyer is outside the U.S., additional shipping charges may apply and will be calculated and payable after the sale and prior to shipment.