Steve Armes

Artist’s Statement

My goal as a painter is simple. I am moved by the beauty in nature, and I wish to share that with others. I have also been moved by the beauty of art, and long to create works that will have the same impact the viewer. Because I have focused on landscape lately, I search for ways to bring my joy of discovering places of beauty to the world.
Steve Armes was born in 1958 and took an early interest in art. He was fascinated by the illustrators of the Golden Age. When he began his formal study of art in college at San Jose State University, he hoped to learn to paint like the old masters. He was disillusioned by the trend to promote avant-garde art and the disparagement of traditional painting. He found a teacher who went against the grain and taught the fundamentals of art as practiced for four centuries. His name was Maynard Dixon Stewart, and he was trained by Frank Vincent DuMond who studied in Paris in the nineteenth century and was a friend of Whistler, Sargent and William Merritt Chase. From Stewart, Armes learned the tenants of academic painting and derived a love for painting the landscape.

Armes learned the way that eighteenth and nineteenth century landscape painters would work directly from nature, doing small oil color sketches on location to use as the basis for creating larger, more definitive paintings in the studio. He also came to understand that simply copying a photograph would never produce the kind of natural representation of nature that has been the goal of the great landscapists he admires.
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