John Stephens
John Stephens is a scholar as well as an artist. He first taught art as a volunteer
instructor at Vermont State Penitentiary. He continued to teach painting and the history of art, and until his forced retirement due to poor health, he headed the art department at Hanover High School in New Hampshire. In the last two years of his teaching post he taught with the great German painter, Hannes Beckmann.
He was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania in 1945 and graduated from Dartmouth College with a B.A. Degree in 1970. He studied under George Rickey, Richard Anuskiewicz, Walter Murch, and Varujan Boghosian. He has served on the board of directors at AVA Gallery in Hanover, New Hampshire, and exhibited his works in one-man shows at Gallery 2, Woodstock and Vermont Artisans Gallery, Stafford, Vermont. His paintings have also been exhibited at the Jaffe-Fried Gallery, Dartmouth College, Lord & Taylor Art Gallery, New York City, and the Art Center Gallery in Honolulu, Hawaii.
When John Stephens chose an artist's career due to his health conditions, he felt compelled to measure his painting ability against those of the great masters, particularly the visual richness of the fifteenth-century Flemish painters. Combining his technical ability with a brilliant ease of color value, the artist's finished works are worthy of comparison with the mystical realism of the Viennese fantastic realists.