TitleCanon
Artist
Stephen Westfall
(b. 1953)
Date2002
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 60 1/4 × 60 1/4 in.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, September 23, 2009
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Gift of Stephen Westfall, 2009
Object number2009.17
Label TextStephen Westfall has been at the forefront of a renaissance in abstract painting over the last ten years. Born in New York, Westfall attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studied with Paul Wonner and received his BFA in 1975 and MFA in 1978. Westfall's abstraction is often reliant on allusions to aspects of reality such as landscape, music, or flags and pageantry and he is best known for his colorful "broken grid" paintings. "Canon" is a significant transitional painting for the artist and draws on a number of his interests for its subject. The title is a direct reference to the musical term canon, a repeated melodic line. The composition has an underlying structure of a suggested grid pattern, but is absent of repeated vertical lines. The horizontal lines are interspersed with brightly colored rectangles throughout, suggesting the lines of a musical staff. In 2009 Westfall was a Rome Prize recipient and spent a year at the American Academy in Rome.
