Stephanie Wooster

Artist Biography
Stephanie Wooster is a painter and art historian who lives in West Michigan. She has a BA in art with a minor in Russian from Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, Michigan and a dual master’s degree, MFA in painting and MS in art history, from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been included in many group exhibitions at esteemed venues such as, the Muskegon Museum of Art, Grand Rapids Art Museum, the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn, Combined Talents: Florida International at Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts in Tallahassee, and the Texas National at Stephen F. Austin State University. Ms. Wooster has received numerous awards for excellence in painting and academics including the Beatrice Cox Pratt in Venice, Italy Scholarship and Pratt Institute's Certificate of Excellence Award for Outstanding Merit in Graduate Fine Arts.

Artist Statement
The ability to see beyond the ordinary is what interests me the most. By presenting the common or mundane as mysterious or unusual, I hope to provoke the viewer to rediscover the world around him or her. I paint in a photo-realistic manner in order to heighten the subject and environment to a level surpassing how one would normally experience them. Working in the same manner, I am presently producing a series of paintings of paper on fire. The laborious effort of capturing pieces of paper on fire transpired into an idea about capturing time, or a moment of death, so to speak, in regards to not only the loss of memory of the image or text on the paper, but the dissolution of the paper itself. In some of the paintings the viewer will see what is printed on the paper, while in other instances they will not. It is the ephemeral quality of things, ideas, and life that I find so compelling and that which I hope capture in this new series.