(b. 1956)
Stephen Lane has always been an ambitious artist. Born in Buffalo in 1956, he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting, New York Studio School and Antioch College. He was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1987. Lane has international teaching experience, beginning with an artist’s residency in the Central Academy of Art in Beijing, China in 1987; followed by visiting artist positions at the School of Visual Arts, New York (1990), Parsons School of Design and City University of New York (1991), and University of Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn Art University, Estonia (1993). Some of teaching experiences coincided with exhibitions he organized, which included his own work, such as Beijing/New York: Works on Paper, comprised of 22 Chinese and 22 American artists (1988-1989), USA/Japan/China Drawings (1991), and SAMOS/NEW YORK (4 Greek and 4 American artists) in Samos, Greece (1996).
The Burchfield Art Center gave him a small solo exhibition, Stephen Lane: New Work in what was called the “Up Front Gallery” in Rockwell Hall from July 27 - October 6, 1996. Lane's work included primarily monochromatic oil on canvas paintings and drawings that utilize a repetition of non-objective imagery. In addition to creating art, he has organized several international art exhibitions. This exhibit traveled to the International University in Moscow, Russia, October 23 - November 1, 1996. Writing about his work in 1996, Richard Huntington said:
And for all the interest that Lane has in the social order, his abstract paintings are mute on subject. Their minimal, vaguely geometric forms are almost buried in the rich texture of heavily applied oil paint. Though he restricts himself to mostly off-whites and grays, muddied ochres and grayed blues, his paintings rumble with an inner agitation. The paint seems to clog up around the edges of the forms as well as at the edges of the painting, making it seem that it can barely contain the emotion from spilling out of the canvas.