Steve Briscoe

About Steve Briscoe

These colorful portraits are a newish direction for me but build on my earlier graphic work. In the early 80s, I produced silk-screen prints with fields of dots, layering many colors to achieve a fuzzy Op-Art effect. Then, they were about a murky dystopian future. Now, they are more of a rumination on confusion and falling apart.

In the 1990s, I pursued name-calling and other defining nouns and verbs scrawled behind an everyman silhouette or innocent animal outlines.  More specific characters have replaced the everyman.

Whereas before the words had a graffiti-like urgency, I have slowed my process down and have found using stenciled letters, with their promise of perfection but inevitable failure, to align more with my experience.

Word choices may be as meaningful or meaningless as much of our cultural dialogue, but the dropping of text into a pictorial space challenges us to choose, blend, ignore, and expand our notions of mark-making.

These characters, perhaps from a B-movie drama, are, in unequal parts, me, broad-brush cultural critique and poetic fiction.