I’m not sure how many of you know this…but I was a painter before I was a photographer. In fact, I was a painter for a long time…and studied it for 2 years at Auburn, finishing Painting IV, the last painting that I could take before I did my thesis project and got a degree. But my painting eventually led me to photography, and here I am! Over the course of my studies at Auburn my painting went from attempted semi-realism (haha), to abstraction, to non-objective abstraction, to abstract expressionism (like 18th generation at this point?), to collage and assemblage painting…which is where I left off. I was digging deep into encaustic, which for those of you not familiar, is painting with beeswax, tinted with different colors and hardened with demar, a type of tree sap. My art became almost like journals, where I would collect things from my life, and from my daily travels around campus, and create stories…usually in some sort of container or box, that showed where I had been that day by use of the things that I found…the things left behind. One semester in my painting class I decided that I wanted to push myself by doing a painting a day. I plotted out a 60 day span, and started building the boxes for the project. It was intense…everyday I pushed myself to collect…to find things…sometimes 3D objects, sometimes, something that I’d hear someone say…I collected everything and anything, and began making my collages. The point was to create individual pieces, that together would create something much more powerful than each of the pieces…something intense, that showed the intensity of the project, and in the end created a “wall” of my past 2 months. The end result was a 5′ tall 12′ long “mural”. Here’s a horribly stitched photo of the project at it’s end…sorry…I’m really tired, and couldn’t take anymore of the lense correction at this point…but you’ll get the visual gist of it. My friend John Hosmer, who loans me lights and camera lenses all of the time (Thanks John!) took these back in the Fall of 2006 and I just found them while cleaning out my harddrive tonight! So here it is…an official, authentic, original “Stephen DeVries” painting:

click here for the full size image