Steve Caldwell is a UK painter whose focus is portraits, and by focus I mean rather intense focus. Caldwell’s faces are intensely observed, and rendered with a finessed attention to tone and texture. Many have a feeling of immediacy that at times can even feel a bit confrontational, a sense of “here I am, this is me, like it or not”.
Most interesting to me is that a large percentage of Caldwell’s paintings are monochrome, painted in acrylic in a full range of grays. A number of them are left in an apparently unfinished state with some areas brought to a finish and others little more than a sketched outline against a textured ground.
His work in color is no less intensely observed, with an equal degree of attention to nuanced value relationships.
