Originally from Jakarta, Indonesia, Stephen Godlieb studied painting at the New Hampshire Institute of Art and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Godlieb’s work has been exhibited nationally in both solo and group exhibitions including Merge Arts in Manhattan, NY, the Robert Lincoln Levy Gallery in Portsmouth, NH, the Spectrum Art Fair in Miami, FL, and is held in numerous public and private collections internationally. His work was published in the Arts Issue of IDIR Magazine and featured in Studio Visit Magazine. He was awarded Outstanding Upcoming Painter by Seacoast Magazine and curated the exhibition Swimming with the Lights Off at the Riversea Gallery.
“The human figure draws into my imagination so I can express abstraction fully. The people around me, including my friends and family, are usually my references for my paintings. I chose to paint mostly human figure and portrait. Many of my ideas come from my surroundings combined with process of working with the meaning of its words. I encourage my subjects to try to provoke thought and mood through gaze because I’m not interested in presenting the viewer with an ambivalent or pleasant painting, I prefer emotive strength. I’m interested in abstract concepts; the paint as a medium and how my medium operates on the paper with the figure as the scaffold for my ideas I tend to treat color within the medium quite aggressively showing highlight the realism of the figure while also adding paint marks that blend into the background so some spaces become abstract. I believe my pursuit as a painter is to straddle the line between figuration and abstraction.”