Stephen Duren was born and reared in the amber light of northern California. He moved to West Michigan in 1978 where he taught for six years in local colleges before settling into his full-time vocation as a painter. Chicago Tribune critic Alan Artner lauded the “...modest, unaffected freshness” of his small pleinair landscape paintings, but Nathan Matteson of Chicago's New City wrote, “The work that shows him at his best is the kind that crosses those useless boundaries of representational and abstract.”
Duren attended the San Francisco Art Institute in the 70’s but skipped many of his studio classes in favor of working outside, directly from nature. Over time he developed a painting vocabulary based upon the textures and patterns of his surrounding rural landscape. Fences, fields, cow paths, roads, trees, shadows, clouds all appear in his paintings literally or symbolically as he dances between realism and abstraction.
He was inspired by numerous European artists from the 1800’s, including Constable, Corot, Corbet, Sisley, Van Gogh and Monet. In Duren’s figurative interiors, we see his love for the work of the French “Intimist” painter, Pierre Bonnard.
Duren’s American influences include Albert P. Ryder, George Inness and Gottardo Piazzoni. However, by the turn of this century he was under the influence of those artists closest to his boyhood home in California, the San Francisco Bay Area Post Abstract Expressionists. He was especially drawn to the searching, palimpsest painting surfaces of Richard Diebenkorn.
Much of his work remains semi-abstract, but Duren is often pulled away from his studio by a call he has answered since his youth to paint directly from nature. Of these moments Grand Rapids Magazine wrote that he is “rejoicing in the rightness of created things.”
Duren earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Masters degrees from San Francisco Art Institute and California State University, Sacramento respectively.
He was Assistant Professor at Kendall College of Art & Design in Grand Rapids, MI from 1979 to 1984 and served on the adjunct faculties of Grand Valley State University, William James College, and Muskegon Community College in Michigan.
Duren has served on the Michigan Council for the Arts grants commission, juried various Michigan exhibitions, and has been a guest speaker at numerous public and private institutions. (Speaking engagements can be arranged through the contact page of this site.)
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Duren's wife, Victoria Peabody, is an art and early childhood educator and designer of educational tools. She accompanies Duren on most of his painting trips, recording in her journals with notes and sketches. Their excursions through Michigan, northern California, Italy and France have born fruit in numerous pleinair paintings and pleasant days suspended in quiet nature.
