Stephen Westfall

Stephen Westfall is an American painter, critic, and professor at Rutgers University and Bard College.

When Stephen Westfall was an adolescent, he was fascinated by the social spaces created by architecture. By age twelve, he was bringing home books about Louis Kahn, Le Corbusier, and Luis Barragán, architects who carved up space with colored walls. Barragan was more polychromatic, but even white was a color for Corbusier, who also added color to his interior walls in his chapel masterpiece. Stephen Westfall attended University of California, Santa Barbara with a B.A. and M.F.A. in 1978.

After an art class taken at the College of Creative Studies in Santa Barbara which further ignited his already creative spirit, he picked up an art major to go with a Literature major. As a student, he loved 60's American abstract painting because it seemed to address interior space with the same forthrightness that the architects he admired addressed exterior space. He later received his Master of Fine Arts also from the University of California, Santa Barbara. While he was still an undergraduate, he also began writing art criticism for Art Week, then the only art magazine on the west coast. He has continued to write art criticism after he moved to New York (state), beginning with Arts Magazine in 1981.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023