Stephanie Strange
Stephanie Strange is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages drawings on paper, watercolor paintings and kinetic hanging art. It also includes an extensive venue of typewriter-inspired art: artwork typed on manual typewriters, sculptures created with parts, a collection of typed poetry and interactive presentations.
Stephanie began her professional art career in 2003 based out of a storefront studio in Chicago, her back door a block away from a Lake Michigan beach and the El train at her front doorstep. Drawing with graphite might be considered her first love as she has been drawing line forms since a young girl in the 70’s. And her fascination with the typewriter was born in 1998 with free style poetry she was typing on a borrowed manual.
Possibilities with the typewriter has been an involved, branching out, explorative journey. She also has a hanging art admiration that is connected to a visceral feeling of balance. The first time she was aware of this sensation was on a family art museum outing when she witnessed a large Calder mobile and her seven-year-old heart stood still like she had met her soulmate. Her most recent journey with watercolor painting came in 2019 through a flash of desire to work with a medium as fluid as her subject of inspiration and her practice processes.
The use of different mediums allows her to express the beauty of energy as a communication that runs through all existence and is unified in the ideas and methods of creating. Organic lines and forms, movements of machines and working with the fluidity of pigments in water all have a similar theme of definition that is in constant change. Stephanie’s inspiration is energy and how it flows through and connects all things. She expresses this focus by working multidimensional through the application of combining creative intention of subject, medium and method.
She keeps a close connection and commune with nature and the human spirit. Her works are visual stories presented as amorphous organic forms composed of simple elements such as lines and shapes. She enjoys balancing duality of ideas and process in her work: she believes all parts that make up an art piece contribute unique attributes and consequences to a single story. Her work is created organically and is organic in presentation, so it is fitting that her life journey is also organic.
She grew up in North Texas with a spirit of exploration and positioned her life to learn about different cultures of people, cities, countries, nature and geographies by living in a variety of situations. From small towns to big cities in Texas, along Lake Michigan in Chicago, being community established in Bastrop, living nomadically in a tent and walking through the eastern states, living a bicycle distance from Rotterdam and Amsterdam in The Netherlands then returning to rural Texas down a mile long dirt road with family, living on a writer’s retreat in Austin, Texas, to a summer on a sailboat in Arkansas all the way back to Texas where she now has a nature surrounded studio in the rolling hills of northwest Austin. It has been her interest to seek out a broad spectrum of how everything is interconnected and flows together by submerging her life in different arenas and sharing her discoveries as visual stories in her art.
