Steve Dininno's Gallery

Artist Statement

I work in a variety of media, but am primarily a painter and printmaker. Whether applying paint to canvas or ink to an etching plate, composition and light are my deepest interests. I strive for a musical quality, a certain rhythm in each piece I create. It has to be a visual piece of music where every element is properly placed, important in and of itself yet intertwined with all other elements. Some images are simple and stark. Others have a complexity that echoes the subject, be it a dense wooded interior or a gritty cityscape.

Carrying a sketchbook is a decades old habit of mine and most of my paintings and prints are born from my scratchy city and landscape sketches. Sometimes a single sketch can yield multiple paintings, collages and/or prints. Like a jazz composition, an image can be executed many times over and yet no two are the same. The rhythm changes because of the choice of medium or the developing vision of what it can be.

Lately, cityscapes have dominated my attention. Factories, roads, highway ramps and water towers are the "notes" in my recent work. Sometimes figures are part of the compositions, but are of the same structural importance as girders, windows or streetlights.