"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
••••
“It wasn’t an urge to play God that prompted Stephen
Alcorn to reinvent the rooster, the cow, dog, owl, frog, tiger and even
the Himalayan yak. It’s more a case of “the divine discontent
of the truly creative mind” that bars him from repeating what has
been done before. In his prints, with Medici-like indulgence, Alcorn has
permitted himself every whim. The plates are saturated with texture, the
borders are bursting with design themes and the animals themselves are
invested with heroic and magical powers. The cow is capable of infinite
pales of milk, the frog will turn into a prince momentarily, the valiant
horse carries his knight to victory, the cat can cast spells and make
sad princesses smile.”
- Marion
Muller
from Stephen Alcorn Reinvents the Rooster
U&LC, volume 16, number 3, summer 1989
••••
“We are reproducing Stephen Alcorn’s Ritratti degli
Artisti Più Celebri, because we not only admire his unabashed
hero-worship and the deep sentiment behind the project, but because we
are completely bowled over by his artistry”.
- Marion Muller
Associate Editor, U&LC Journal
from “Stephen Alcorn’s Ritratti degli Artisti Più
Celebri”; feature article, U&LC Journal
Volume 7, Number 4,
December 1980
••••
“I’ve always thought of art as being the perfect
marriage of things seen and things dreamed,” Stephen Alcorn
recently observed towards the end of a long, thoughtful conversation
about his work. “It’s that marriage of the way we see things
in our imagination and the way we perceive them physically in nature
that creates tension and dynamic. Where do you find the right meeting
point? In portraiture, for example, you can think of an egg and
embellish it and arrive at a portrait. And you can also see the actual
head in all its detail, subtlety, and complexity and distill it and
arrive at an egg. The key is finding the middle ground where
there’s a degree of distillation and abstraction without forsaking
the character traits that give the specific subject its
individuality.”
- Carol Stevens
Executive Editor, Print Magazine
From Choice Cuts, a cover story on
the art of Stephen Alcorn
Print Magazine, January-February issue,
1994
••••
“Stephen Alcorn relishes the challenges inherent in the
linocut print, pushing them and exploiting them to achieve effects that
are truly ground breaking and uniquely his. Indeed, his investigation of
the linocut medium has been a kind of odyssey in which each discovery
has led to a new vision, and the territory to be explored is apparently
boundless.”
- Carol Steven
Executive Editor, Print Magazine
excerpt from the cover story
entitled Choice Cuts: Stephen Alcorn’s favored technique
is the linocut, thought
by many to be an unsophisticated medium. But he
has exploited it to brilliant and ground breaking effect.
January-February, 1994; pg. 32-41
••••
Not since the Belgian master Frans Masereel (1889 - 1972) has an
artist reached such elevated heights in the art of printmaking”
— Daniele Baroni, Critic and Art Historian
From the cover story entitled The Art of Stephen Alcorn
Linea
Grafica, Number 296; Pg. 10-19; Milano, Italy; 1995
••••