Colleen McCubbin Stepanic explores the possibilities of painting through large scale works that often include the destruction and reconstruction of her prior paintings. McCubbin Stepanic earned a BFA from the University of Dayton in Ohio and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Elkins Park, PA. The artist had a solo exhibition at the Zillman Art Museum in Bangor, Maine in 2023. McCubbin Stepanic’s work has been featured in exhibitions at The LaGrange Art Museum (Georgia), The Susquehanna Museum of Art (Pennsylvania), The Woodmere Art Museum(Pennsylvania), and the Toledo Museum of Art (Ohio). Her work has been shown repeatedly in many states including, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Georgia, Arizona, Tennessee, Ohio, Washington D.C. and New York. She has had 15 solo exhibitions of her work since 2003 and has participated in art projects in Budapest, Hungary and Batoufam, Cameroon. McCubbin Stepanic currently lives and works near Philadelphia.
Statement
Between 2003 and 2008 I made paintings with flowing paint and gestural mark making focused on the people and places in my life. In these works I explored my experiences which sometimes seemed to be in conflict with each other. Layering images helped me to understand and resolve internal conflicts created by the fragmentation I was experiencing as an artist, mother, and full time (non tenure) educator. Struggling to be three things at once I was plagued by a sense of failing at all of them. In 2008 after the collapse of the auto and housing industries we faced financial ruin and that sense of failure infiltrated all aspects of my experience. In the studio the ultimate outcome of this was a major shift in my way of working.
I started to cut and tear my work. The 3 dimensional forms that resulted satisfied a physical need for my work to take up space. That space engaged the emotional content of my work more effectively than when it was flat. It also it deepened my metaphorical use of layering. In my painting I use an intuitive and destructive layering process in which each new layer obscures some of the previous layer. When I began to cut these paintings the destruction became more visible to the viewer. The cut and then the overlap necessary to sew two pieces together made it very clear to the viewer that parts were missing or hidden. The paintings that I cut up were often deeply important to me. Putting them through this transformation was painful, meaningful, and exhilarating. My decisions about what shapes to cut and how to repeat them were often inspired by rock formations whose evidence of cycles of growth, destruction, and regrowth felt relevant to my practice.
Just before the onset of Covid 19, in October 2019, I moved my studio home. I am currently creating work that considers the relationship between the decorative and the domestic. I've long considered the domestic as a critical space for our psychological development, as such it has held an important place in my work as an artist. Over the past three years while my husband and I both worked from home I adapted to creating work in a smaller space in which I was almost never alone. This resulted in me thinking more actively about the relationship between the decorative and psychological. I make work in a variety of material including acrylic, canvas, fabric, and thread.
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