Stephen McCurdy
Stephen McCurdy was born in Roxburgh, Central Otago, in 1949.
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In the late sixties he studied music and cello at Canterbury University. He wrote a thesis on atonal motivic analysis of Schoenberg's Op 16 Pieces for Orchestra which he didn't submit, though he did encounter the works of German painters of the Weimar period like Dix, Beckmann, Grosz, which were influential later.
He subsequently worked for thirty years as a composer, music producer and director, production photographer and occasional songwriter for NZ theatre, television and film.
He began painting in 1996, and has infrequently exhibited.
'I'm not trying to assert or explain anything. I don't wish to engage in an art determined by dialectic or dogma or politic or ambition.
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I look for richness and intricacy of association. I hope for a painting that carries past, present, and possibility. I hope that its shapes and colours, its light and darkness, suggest thought and feeling, character, belief. That its imaginary third dimension feels substantial, not as in vanishing-point perspectival literalism, but subjectively.
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My paintings are not of things I've seen or imagined. They're just what I find when I paint.'