Tuesday, June 9, 2020 – Saturday, August 1, 2020

Closing Reception: TBA

This virtual exhibition hosted by Alfa Art Gallery showcases a wide range of local and international oil paintings and mixed media. Learn about each of the artists, their encounters, impressions, abstractions, and more through the use of oil paint. Ten of my oil paintings will be on display.

You can find the virtual exhibition on Alfa Art Gallery’s website, and Artstep’s website.

Click here to view a slideshow of the work included in the exhibition.

“Stephanie Desphande paints with the diarist’s trained observation and poet’s intent. She keeps a canvas in lieu of a journal and regularly explores not only the characters around her, but the sentiments and stories that they carry as well. Inspired by portraitist John Singer Sargent, the often life-like portrayal of her subjects is highly deliberate. Furthermore, she plays with the relationship between light and darkness, often painting with chiaroscuro– a technique developed during the Renaissance that shrouds the subject, surrounded by darkness, in a beam, or several, of light. Placing faces and objects in the heart of intriguing and curious scenes, she provides little in the way of contextualization. Rather, Desphande teases her audience with subtleties and implications, thus leaving the narrative up to our own interpretations through the emotions and actions that she proposes. According to Desphande, her work “has been described as having a ‘something-going-on’ quality to it”, which is her goal. Ultimately, Desphande hopes to evoke the realities of life through her application of schooled artistry to the honest and actual vignettes that she dissects. Above are three of Desphande’s oil painting’s: “By the Light of the Moon”; “Autumn Flowers”; and “Preparations”. More of her work will be featured in “Encounters”, Alfa’s current virtual exhibition running from June 9–August 1.”

-Alpha Art Gallery