Erica Steiner

Artist Statement:

My paintings explore the idea that the basic human drive to ornament the material world is fundamentally innate, irresistible, and at its core, motivated by deeper impulses to understand the meaning of life and to experience a universal, elemental or essential reality.  I use painting as a vehicle to engage with the act of ornamentation as a disciplined and sustained practice, and as a means of dialoging with fine art, folk art and craft traditions that for centuries have sought to interpret nature through a lens of careful and ornate pattern work, ultimately echoing the cellular patterns that constitute all matter.  Incorporating elements of landscape, textile design and abstraction, my paintings employ a highly detailed visual language drawn from a wide and continually evolving range of influences, including traditional Indian and Aboriginal painting, psychedelic art, graphic design, Japanese landscape painting, medieval Catholic illuminated manuscripts,  mid-century modernism and Victorian imagery.  The work is rendered in oil and gold leaf on canvas, in series of twenty to thirty paintings, painted in many layers, over time.

Erica Steiner is a San Francisco Bay Area based painter working primarily in oil and gold leaf on canvas. She holds a BA from Mills College and an MA from New College of California, and has been painting professionally since 2005.

Her work has been exhibited widely across California and beyond, and featured in various online and print publications, including Lost at E Minor, Art-Sponge.com, Juxtapoz.com, Visual Revolution, Citizen LA Magazine, and Redefine Magazine, among others. She has been affiliated with Edgar Varela Fine Arts in Los Angeles since 2008, which in 2011 hosted her most recent solo exhibition, Heaven is Not the Wide Blue Sky. She is currently preparing for a bay area solo exhibition at St. Mary’s College in Moraga in 2012.