We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Stevan Dupus a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Stevan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?
My love for art began when I was around the age of 6 or 7 and my father first took me to the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City and I saw Caravaggio’s St. John the Baptist for the very first time. After that anytime we would visit the museum, I had to find that painting and spend a majority of my time with it. Due to this, I began taking elective art classes in 6th grade and continued through out my middle and high school years. After high school, I took a break from art and got my first college degree in computer programming. I spent a few years working in the computer field as well as some telemarketing work and really felt like this was the wrong path for my life and I needed to get out. With only $600 to my name, I packed my little white Mercury Capri and headed west to California. I really had no idea where I was heading in California and received a phone call from a high school friend who offered me her couch in San Diego for a couple weeks so I could get on my feet. It was shortly after my arrival in San Diego that I began working at a financial planning firm as a recruiter and a month later, my own apartment. I knew I needed to go back to school so I could pursue a new career, so I began attending night classes at San Diego City College. It was here that I returned to my love of art and began taking oil painting classes. Up to this point, despite being in love with Caravaggio’s oil painting, I myself, had never created a painting in oil. Learning to paint in oil in Wayne Hulgin’s classes opened my world up to a new art medium for me. I finished my studies at San Diego City College with an associate degree in 3d arts in 2011 and immediately applied to an undergraduate program at California State University, Long Beach. Going into this degree I was trying to figure out how I would make money while working within the world of art, and I went in with the mindset that I would get a BFA in Drawing and Painting and then get a teaching credential so I could teach K-12 classes. It was here that Professor Fran Siegel helped me realize that I wouldn’t have a lot of time to create my own art if I was teaching K-12 and that I should get an MFA so that I can teach at the college level. I received my BFA in 2014 and took a year off from school after I had gotten married. This time allowed me to refocus on my newly wedded life as well as where my artwork was going. Upon receiving offered from a few different graduate schools, I accepted going back to CSULB due to financial reasons. Many lessons were learned while I attended grad school, and I took as many internships as I could to get as much classroom experience as I could. Before I had even graduated I was offered to teach a course and I excitedly accepted. Nervous and anxious, I walked in to my class the first day and took roll, asked icebreaker questions and went over the syllabus. On day 2 I began my instructions and was loving my time in the classroom. It was after this class that I had known I wanted to pursue a career as an art instructor. Since graduating in 2019, I have continued to teach every semester, create my own art, and have at least 2 exhibitions per year (except 2020 due to covid).
Stevan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I create paintings that depict the social interactions within San Diego’s LGBTQ+ bar communities. Having worked extensively as a bar manager and bartender for over 15 years, I have witnessed the shrinking role of the LGBTQ+ bar as a safe space. I have been exploring contradicting emotional responses as well as the influence of queer coding on the LGBTQ+ community. Common themes explore joyful human interactions refuting the underlying theater of loneliness and depression. Single loners pair themselves amongst groups of people while other paintings challenge public verses private through moments of passion. Viewers are then both brought into and pushed out of these rapturous spaces.
Seeking to create a homo-normative narrative, my process begins through lived experience within LGBT+ night life. While participating within these safe spaces I designate areas that meet my compositional requirements to photograph. Upon review, the source images are then collaged together either physically through printed image or digitally in Photoshop. Using these photographic images, I crop my compositions in such a way as to bring the viewer into the narrative while echoing social media’s presence within these spaces. My pallet mimics the bars dark and alluring atmosphere while unusual highlights and heavily saturated color reflect neon lights and filters found in night clubs. Paint variation between thin paint and impasto cold wax medium symbolize time, movement, distance and intoxication. In some work, glitter is introduced to fracture or destabilize the moment or to encapsulate the viewer while it floats above the surface of the painting. Flags within the abstracted silhouettes are used to push the plebeian quality of the figures while constraining them within their respective LGBT+ category and can become direct references to sexual language within LGBT+ history.
The work focuses on non-assimilationist politics. It investigates the duality of how the LGBT+ community strives to maintain its diversity and queerness while at the same time become culturally assimilated. My work portrays the community as a homo-normative entity that is a mirror reflection to heteronormative society. Touching on feminism’s concept of the male gaze, I expose the viewer to a voyeuristic window of the LGBT+ nightlife for the purpose of scopophilia. Confronting the viewer with the political, it challenges the viewer to question their own role within or outside of LGBT+ society.
Influential artist to my work run from such artist as David Park and the other Bay Area Figuration movement artist to David Hopper, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Their heavy paint application and photographic cropping is appropriated to bring these techniques into a modern context. While like Felix-Gonzalez-Torres, I seek to encode the art with idea of love, loss and desire. More contemporary artist such as John Sonsini and Andrew Salgado can be seen as inspiration. Particularly Sonsini’s homage of the mundane day laborers, the physicality of the clothing as well as the subtle distortions of the figure. Within Salgado’s work I am inspired by his colorful abstractions and saturation of color inlying the portraits. The expressions on his subjects evoking raw emotion. Reflecting on these artist, my work seeks to illustrate the erosion of these social landscapes over the years though both social media apps change on the way gay men are finding partners as well as societies acceptance of the LGBT+ community.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect of being an artist for me is stepping back from a finished painting and seeing what you imagined in existence. So much of the creating process is a struggle and a lot of hard work. Whether it be research, preliminary sketches, drawing the underpainting, mixing colors, even what kind of mark to make on your canvas. The act of creation is a dance between disappointment and satisfaction. After a session of painting I always feel beaten up and emotionally drained. But the moment you put your final brush stroke on the canvas and step back to see your completed work makes all the pain and loneliness worth every moment.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)
I think NFTs are strange, confusing and cool. I know so many people are afraid of crypto currency and NFTs but I’ve always been open to risk taking as one should be as an artist. Wanting to learn more, I have myself dived into the world of NFTs and at this point created 2 myself. I think the real struggle isn’t the process you have to go through to purchase the crypto currency, setting up a wallet and linking it to a market place. This was all very easy to do. The struggle for me was how do you market your NFT after you’ve minted it and placed it in the market place for sale or auction. I was lucky to have sold my first NFT due to word of mouth and not in the market place. I can’t even get my NFT to show up if I search for it by name. So to answer the question, I think the whole mindset of purchasing digital content that could be accidentally deleted is a bit strange and dangerous. The technology and terminology confusing. But the whole idea of making a digital art piece, selling it and then being able to keep receiving royalties is pretty cool.
Contact Info:
- Website: Www.StevanDupusArts.com
- Instagram: StevanDupusArts
- Facebook: Stevan Dupus
- Linkedin: Stevan Dupus