Andrew Stevovich
~Illustrator

Born in Salzburg, Austria, Andrew Stevovich came to the United States with his parents in 1950. Growing up in Washington D.C., he recalls that the National Gallery of Art became his second home: "While other kids were going to baseball games, I was staring at the Old Masters." Despite the predominance of nonobjective art, his student work at Rhode Island School of Design inclined toward the figure. His later development was not surprising. Given his passion for Renaissance painting, the polished surfaces, precise draftsmanship, Venetian palette, and meticulous glazes of his canvases are logical.

His concern, however, are those of today's world. We recognize the settings - beaches, subways, bars - but the events are not explicitly narrative. If a story is told in a Stevovich canvas or etching, it is usually ambivalent or arcane. The people of his universe are culled from life and then distilled by the artist's imagination; they have the intimacy of characters seen closely on the stage or strangers observed from a hidden vantage point. They are inscrutably preoccupied, wearing expressions of satiety, boredom, repressed passion, contained anger or furtive curiosity. Their involvement in the most common occurrences seems to be metaphorical. None of this is didactic nor is it even social commentary. It is more an insightful observation of the quiet drama of the flow of everyday life and sometimes its accompanying ills: isolation, narcissism, boredom, frivolity, the longing for the intimacy and the fear of it. All seen through the artist's purified detachment.

                - with permission from Warren Adelson

More information about Andrew Stevovich and his paintings can be found at Adelson Galleries in New York City.

Adelson Galleries will be hosting a show of Andrew Stevovich's work, including the etchings featured in Beasts and Citizens from October 10 through November 3, 2001.

For information about the graphic work of Andrew Stevovich, contact Clark Gallery in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

"Those who may already be familiar with Andrew Stevovich's work can understand how gratified I felt when he consented to produce a suite of etchings to accompany my translations.

What makes Stevovich and La Fontaine an almost ideal pairing is that the present-day artist, like the 17th seventeenth century poet, has a deeply ironic sense of humor about human beings. People fascinate Stevovich. His art is filled with images of people whose faces guardedly express a whole range of human emotions-fear, anger, desire, contempt, and cupidity are some of them-with which the fables teem.

But in his illustrations for my translations, the artist has done something unprecedented. Unlike previous illustrators of the fables, rather than simply giving us yet another set of clever animal drawings - after all, one could hardly improve on those done by Oudry in the 18th century or Dore' in the 19th nineteenth-he has chosen to portray directly the humans for whom the animals of the fables are stand-ins.

And even here the artist has chosen to look obliquely, not simply to retell the tales in graphic form. These are not literal illustrations, but images evoked by the tales, parallel to them. The eight resultant magisterial, spirited, subtle, funny etchings amplify and enrich my translations immeasurably. They are illustrations for our era."

                                                  -Craig Hill