‘Gender Study’
Here is the sequence of the digital paintings in the video, with a few brief commentaries:
1.’There is no such thing as mistaken happiness.’
The text/title is a sort of pronouncement, but intended to be provocative and invite thinking, rather than presuming to answer. A title can do many things, it seems. As for the picture, I couldn’t very easily explain its relationship to the title - but I’m sure that the music helps to “explain” the connection.
2. ’Her nervous system, it turned out, had some unusual features.’
A picture I made many versions of; and indeed perhaps even this one is not the final. Edgard Varèse said he liked a certain awkwardness in a work of art - to which Stravinsky commented that that tells you something about Varèse’s art, at least…
3. ‘Once a year, on the night of the last full moon…’
From a sort of alternate anthropology; I recall that Ursula K. LeGuin’s parents were anthropologists.
4. ‘Nobodaddy’
The reference to William Blake is not entirely coincidental.
5. ‘I, too, am a cat’
A title I have used before; since I discovered it, I have on occasion been able to say it out loud to certain cats.
6. ‘In no hurry…’
My re-telling of a Giacomo Casanova story. I dare not re-read his, since it is bound to be better told - whatever his many failings and mis-deeds, he was a great storyteller. All the same, I think that mine is more than a mere amusement, and is not just a modernized version of his story.
7. ‘There are things buried…’
The voice of a rational and logical thinker who might nevertheless be dangerously unbalanced. If you think that seems to fit the era we live in, I could not argue the point.
8. ‘What if you lived your life as one long gesture?’
(An almost necessary antidote to the picture before.) A simple possibility, one that might be unexpected and even inspiring in its absurdity. Perhaps you could start watching yourself, perhaps that’s really true, perhaps in watching you could discover something hitherto unobserved. Perhaps, as in the Gospel of Thomas, bringing out that which is within you will give you life.
9. ‘Maybe yes, maybe no…’
I’ve always loved this hilariously witty little bit of music from Stravinsky’s ‘Pulcinella’ (and that whole marvelous ballet), to which I think I’ve added something fitting. The figure, with its radically reduced details, seems to me perfect for an unresolved and irresolute character.
10. ‘I went back to the graveyard’
It may be that this little text could become a horror story, or more likely a parody of a horror story; but I prefer it as it is, as though torn from some unknown context.
11. ‘Urwald’
This one has no text and serves as a kind of transition, as well as a needed opposition to the dark picture that comes before it. The German word, incidentally, means a primeval forest.
12. ‘For you live like seabirds’
This is a quotation from the ancient Roman official Cassiodorus, writing to the people of the Venetian lagoon, long before there was a Venice, suggesting many things about the Venetian character that would still be valid centuries later. My image was inspired by the place itself, but particularly by an artifact I saw in the Museo Correr there.
13. ‘The Enteric Brain’
From an alternate anatomy, though that Enteric Brain is indeed something now recognized by research - it is only my image that is a fantasy. That that muddy swamp that is the lower abdomen is represented in gold is an ironic amusement - but it is also an emblem of that truth that we now recognize about “gut feelings” - that inner truth that we feel there, and the ample supplies of the hormone serotonin coming from there that give us a feeling of contentment.
14. ‘Waiting for the gift of sound and vision’
A sort of coda. I don’t mean it so much as a grand conclusion, or a comment, for that matter, on my artmaking - which would after all be too neat a maneuver. I will only add that I was very glad to discover this simple, touching, personal little tune by David Bowie - that is in fact about getting to work; it raised my estimation of his output, which I had not thought well of. I am at a time in my life when I can embrace thinking better of someone.
It concludes my sequence with a first-person inwardness that might be surprising, given what has come before; I hope that you will agree that it balances, in this respect and others, the whole rest of the sequence (one reason, at least, why it needs to stay on screen a little longer).
On the creation, materials, inspiration, and concept of ‘Gender Study’
Today we are all, as the current expression goes, “transitioning”; we are at a time when we question even our genders - and some of us find surprising answers. The old categories lose their turgor - if I may use that word - and subjects that seemed free of any gender conversation are now the subjects of dispute - even angry dispute. It seems, indeed, at times, that our discourse is in all its parts and nuances a gender discourse. It is a kind of perversity of me, perhaps, to insist on this title, for the subject-matter is not overtly gender-related. But titles may do many things, I assert, and one of them may be to unify what appears disunified. I hope that this one does so in a surprising way.
This video is a composed sequence of a few of my recent digital paintings, with my texts, written and spoken by me, and intensified with music. The subject-matter is diverse, and if this demonstrates among other things the diversity of my artistic practice, I am glad. At the same time, a so to speak rhythmic integration takes place through the timing and juxtaposition of contrasting material.
Two of the texts are not mine, though I have adapted and modified them; one is from the ancient writer Cassiodorus, and the other is from a Wikipedia article. The rest were written by me. In developing this video, I chose mostly images with shorter texts, in order to better adapt to the formal method here of quick changes and contrast.
The imagery is constructed using found pictures from many sources, not all of which I remember, or captured by me with a camera. They were then processed using a variety of inexpensive applications, mostly on iPads. Blending two (or more) different images, with all the unexpected interactions that often result, is a foundational element of my method. Digital brushes, glitching of many kinds to generate structure and patterns - generating a dialectic between patterns and photographic detail; between the flat expanse of pixels and an illusion of materiality; and between the perfect edge of a geometrical form and the meandering of a digital brush - those dialectics are the keys to my visual language.
Artist Statement
I am a digital painter, and a printmaker of small limited-editions.
My source materials are digital photographs - appropriated, or AI-generated, or captured by me with a camera. I blend, glitch, and re-mix them, sometimes repeatedly, then re-work them using digital brushes and filters. Their lives continue on screens - or as prints, on metals and other substrates.
I use appropriation as quotation, in the manner of collage and post-modernism - but only exceptionally; my interest goes beyond that, modifying and integrating found imagery so that it only sounds a kind of echo in the fully-realized image, adding cultural and visual diversity and depth, its original identity rendered ambiguous; my goal is fusion, beyond juxtaposition.
I run reproduction backwards. I take images from the web and from films — the ubiquitous, disposable commons, mix them with other images, glitch them to impose formal patterns on them, and then work them until they glow.
BIO
Stephen Paré, born in Ithaca, New York, has lived in many places. His father was an engineer and a physicist who worked on fusion energy and arms-control verification technology; his mother was a specialist in early-childhood education. His home is Houston, Texas, but it could be anywhere, really. He enjoys the company of almost everyone.
He makes his artworks in computers and mobile devices; but his artistic models are in the traditions of 20th-Century painting.
2022-24 he had numerous exhibitions in Rome, Milan, Venice, and other Italian cities. Exhibitions in New York City followed in 2024 and 2025; Los Angeles in 2026. In 2025, the Contemporary Arts Museum of Uzbekistan acquired five of his works. In 2026, he collaborated on a video project that has been shown in Los Angeles, Shanghai, and Long Island, New York.
He participates in salons and physical and VR exhibitions with the Techspressionist community.