Words of Praise

"Whether he's interpreting the face of a famous author like Solzhenitsyn, illustrating with impeccable skill and sharp irony a scene from Malraux's Man's Hope, or taking on an entire novel, such as Paul LaFarge's The Artist of the Missing, there's no question that Stephen Alcorn is one of our most technically sophisticated and inspired of artists. The sheer craftsmanship is breathtaking, revealing a kind of artistry that hasn't existed for half a century, nearly obsessed with clean lines, the interplay of light and dark, the myriad possibilities offered by a centimeter of space, a delight in structure, design and texture. But more than the technique is the imagination and visual acuity Alcorn brings to his subjects: playing with perspectives, jostling with angles, combining foreshortened, exterior scenes with larger, emotional interiors, setting our expectations on head so we look, and look again, and marvel. This is multi-dimensional work in the true sense of the term: layered, split-imaged, resonating with multiple--sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory--meanings, brilliantly executed, unfailingly interesting. Throughout his oeuvre Alcorn has lifted "the veil of familiarity," to use the phrase popularized by Wordsworth and Coleridge when stating the mission of the romantic poets. We see the world anew through his eyes, and remain, always, the richer for it."

-John A. Glusman Vice President & Executive Editor, Farrar, Straus & Giroux