All About

The work of Amos Orion Sterns is a detailed exploration of faces and figures set in soft focus, abstract backgrounds. Working in acrylics and ink, Amos captures his subject with simple lines, then pulls the lines beyond their boundaries, refracting the form into complex shapes and abstractions. His heavy, illustrative line and cross contour treatment of interior space creates a web of focus around his subjects, drawing the viewer’s eye to the powerful negative space at the heart of each work.
Amos’s mother, also an artist, encouraged his artistic development and especially impressed on him an appreciation for her favorite artists from Europe’s Old Renaissance Masters, as well as Impressionists, and later Romantic painters and illustrators. These influences competed with the formative pop-imagery of his youth: powerful characters from cartoons, comics, and early video games. Together these disparate styles became powerful influences on his perception of art.
Experimenting during the early days of computer graphics and dabbling in animation helped Amos get into the fine arts and design program at Nebraska Wesleyan University in 2001. It was there that he first began painting, mostly studies in oils. Always prone to looking backward in time for inspiration, he excelled in art history and fell in love with the work of American painter and portraitist John Singer Sargent. These studies led him to incorporate more paint and brush textures into his naturally graphic style. In 2005, Amos earned his BFA in studio art from Wesleyan.
In 2008 Amos started a painting series that ultimately resulted in twenty portraits. This unnamed series began with an old photo Amos had taken of his sister Anna while she was sleeping. Rediscovering the photo in his files at work, Amos was moved by it to create something immediately. He found a recycled piece of matte board to be the canvas. A bottle of ink and a pot of old coffee served as paint. With these scavenged tools he captured his sister’s profile, framed in a nest of twining, graceful lines and washed with sepia tones. The finished work was well-received and he went on to capture the portraits of family members, friends, and co-workers for the series. Although he chose not to use alternative paint or canvas materials again in these paintings, he did replicate the coffee and ink color wash with water-thinned acrylic paint.
In 2010 Amos was doing visual research for the Tesla mural project. For an artist fascinated by faces, Tesla was a wonderful challenge. Although Amos never saw the mural as a portrait-centered project, he was intrigued to see how Tesla’s face changed from photograph to photograph and over time as portraits were taken throughout his life. As Amos drafted the mural design, he copied the figure positions from each photograph faithfully, but in the actual painting of the mural, he interpreted the details of Tesla’s face and figure in a graphic arts style, using textured brushstrokes to provide both line and tone.
Amos had to approach the Tesla mural differently from his previous works. His biggest concerns about the project were: the tight timeline for creating the work, the scale of the materials required to paint a project of this size and the texture of the concrete canvas. Amos has stated that although ultimately he feels the project was successful, in retrospect there is “a roughness to the overall work that I sometimes like and sometimes don’t.”
Since completing the Tesla mural, Amos has continued to do commissioned portraits and illustrations for roleplaying game rulebooks and adventure modules. “My life and my work are part of an ongoing puzzle,” he says.