Steven is a British-born artist and has been living in Auckland since 2000 and works mainly in oil on canvas, but also with photomontage. He has had a career in teaching (Art, English) that has taken him around the world, giving him some insight into different aesthetic senses, arguably feeding into his work.

 

His painting are intended to be dreamlike, yet prompt a sense of recognition as fragments of a strangely familiar world in which the images are staged to form irrational associations.  He thinks common threads have been a sense of the absurd, the unsettling.  There is no political ‘agenda’ or social comment, just an expression of what could be termed angst, and an attempt to illustrate states of mind, a shared psychology.

 

The paintings appear as riddles.  

 

"I don’t believe there is a one-size-fits-all explanation that I can give for the images, and it’s for the onlooker to find sense, or perhaps understand the question posed in the picture.  Following my own intuition, I hope the results resonate with others.  There are no literal messages, but scenes which are mock-allegorical."

 

----Steven Doffman

To inquire about any of the artworks by Steven Doffman, contact the gallery via info@ishengallery.co.nz