want my paintings to contain discrete elements that come together:

-- the reductive and the emotionally expressive
-- the meditative with the sensual and palpable
-- the industrial coolness of the aluminum with the rich warmth of handling
-- the dense opaque sections contrasting with the sense of light and shimmer of the aluminum.

There is often a clarity to the sections of my paintings which must also come together with energy and strong physical presence. I’ve always been attracted to a structured format on which I can hook a lot of layered richness.

Stephanie Weber’s paintings pulsate. Colors reverberate against one another yet coalesce in a brilliant chromatic whole. Composed of horizontal or vertical stripes and broader fields of color, the apparent simplicity of Weber’s current work is deceptive. Her surfaces are worked intensely and are rich in variety. Soft-edged fields of color float atmospherically. Medium-width bands appear abraded, and narrow stripes waver only slightly to avoid the appearance of rigidity. The quietly reflective surfaces of the honeycomb-aluminum panels that the artist uses as a support add luster to this paint layer.

Weber responds to nature in the broadest sense. Her bands of color and texture suggest a recitation of the strata extending from the earth’s core. Weber also sees this ordered universe at microscopic levels in the cellular structures of hair, fiber, skin, bone, and other basic stuffs of life. She is a painter who presents the essence of nature through fundamental elements of color and line. Her aesthetic is thus neither a pure abstraction nor an exact description, but an architecture of the cosmos and, as she concedes, of the spirit.

Scott A. Shields, Ph.D.
Chief Curator
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento

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