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Steven Kenny Ima
Steven Kenny was born in Peekskill, New York in 1962. He attended the Rhode Island School
of Design, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1984. His final year of art school was
spent studying independently in Rome. This direct exposure to European art (especially the
Baroque works of the Italian, Dutch and Flemish schools) had a significant effect on his painting
style.
First settling in New York City, he gained notoriety as a freelance commercial illustrator.
Clients included Sony Music, Time Magazine, AT&T, United Airlines, Celestial Seasonings,
Microsoft and many others. His illustrations repeatedly received awards from the Society of
Illustrators, Communication Arts Magazine and the Art Directors’ Club of New York.
In 1997 Steven moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. From that time forward Steven
devoted his attention entirely to the fine arts. In early 2010 Steven returned to his home
state of New York where we continues to exhibit his award-winning paintings in galleries
across the United States and Europe.
From an early age the beauty and mystery of nature have deeply influenced his chosen subject
matter. Steven’s style might be described as Baroque surrealism. His compositions most often
combine the human figure with elements from nature to comment on our interactions with
the environment while symbolically alluding to the dynamics of human nature in general.
Who are you Steven?
Ha! That’s a good question that I constantly struggle to answer. (It’s 4:30 in the morning and I
couldn’t sleep because this question was on my mind.) In my work I constantly question who
I am and who were are as a species. As much as we like to pretend that we know the answers,
the truth is that we are confused to varying degrees. Being a conscious animal I have a sense
of myself as an individual, yet I still wrestle with my role as a member of the human race. I
view myself as an independent being with intelligence and an imagination yet I wrestle with
primal urges and instincts that I sometimes seem not to have control over. All other “lower”
life forms on the planet occupy their places in the world and don’t question what their responsibilities
are. Nature has no sense of ethics or propriety to get in the way of doing its job
because there is no question about what it needs to do. On the other hand, humans question
just about everything and this creates a lot of uncertainty and anxiety. We try to overcome
these stresses by creating static, predictable environments for ourselves. This, however, raises
more questions and conflicts because there is little agreement on what is static or predictable,
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