Stephen Duren was born and reared in the amber light of northern California. He moved to West Michigan in 1978 where he taught for six years in local colleges before settling into his full-time vocation as a painter. He continues to dance between abstraction and realism. Chicago Tribune critic Alan Artner lauded the “...modest, unaffected freshness” of his small pleinair landscape paintings. In Chicago's New City, Nathan Matteson wrote, “The work that shows him at his best is the kind that crosses those useless boundaries of representational and abstract.”
Duren attended the San Francisco Art Institute in the 70’s but skipped many of his studio classes in favor of working outside, directly from nature. During these periods of pleinair painting he absorbed countless textures and patterns from the landscape, including that particular quality of light that is unique to California. This visual vocabulary became the foundation for his painting, as he moved from realism to abstraction.
He was inspired by numerous European artists from the 1800’s, including Constable, Corot, Corbet, Sisley, Van Gogh and Monet. In Duren’s figurative interiors, we see his love for the work of the French “Intimist” painter, Pierre Bonnard.
Duren’s American influences include Albert P. Ryder, George Inness and Edward Hopper. However, by the turn of this century he was under the influence of those artists closest to his boyhood home in California, the San Francisco Bay Area Post Abstract Expressionists. He was especially drawn to the searching, palimpsest painting surfaces of Richard Diebenkorn.
Much of his work remains semi-abstract, but Duren is often pulled away from his studio by a call he has answered since his youth to paint directly from nature. Of these moments Grand Rapids Magazine wrote that he is “rejoicing in the rightness of created things.”
Duren works closely with his wife, Victoria Peabody, who collaborates on a myriad of design decisions. Victoria, an art and early childhood educator, accompanies Duren on most of his painting trips, documenting his work through journals of notes and sketches. Their painting sojourns to northern areas of California, Michigan, and Italy, as well as Provence, France have born fruit in numerous pleinair and abstract paintings, as well as pleasant days suspended in quiet nature.
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Duren earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Masters degrees from San Francisco Art Institute and California State University, Sacramento respectively.
