Trefonides Exhibition Catalogue

Despite the groups’ scorn for the stereotypic “Maine Landscape” genre, the
environment and the culture of the place seeped into their work as if by osmosis:
tangled woods, coastlines, filtered dappled light all feature. Steve may not be a
landscape painter, and rocky shores and mossy forests are not his subject matter,
but the years of drawing here, living here, sleeping here, dreaming here, the long
summers spent working outside and in the studio have meant that the place and
its particularities permeate his work, appearing as naturally as the sly and
sophisticated people who inhabit his images.
Lubec Wall
Matted unframed ink drawing over
black chalk | 23 3/4” W x 18 1/2” H
| 1970
Fact and fiction meld, characters
reappear-women in trees, card
players, men fighting, poets and
their admirers-again and again
mixing and remixing like the flow
of guests at a cocktail party. The
spaces they inhabit are familiar and
fraught-dark antique looking
bathrooms, fields at sunset or
dawn, tangled woodlands, rocky
outcroppings near ponds. There is
a combination of innocence and
experience-operators and ingénues
in his troupe of players. As art critic
Sebastian Smee put it in his
Introduction to Trefonides’ 2012
exhibit Through the Looking Glass:
“his forms of pictorial dreaming
have a frictionless quality, a “
perhaps this, but why not that?”
aspect, that keeps him-and us-on our
toes.” 1
Firefly Green
Framed pastel on paper | 32” H x 26” W | 1996
His sensibility is grounded in turn-of-the-century French avante garde
painting and in the history of photography. The early uses of photography as a
means for telling of jokes 2 or as erotica, or as a form of travel-all permeate the
worlds he creates within his images.““ we used to go rummaging through the
junkshops at the North station”,…” I’ll never forget my excitement at first
coming across a stack of stereopticon slides of Victorian Egypt. Some of these
images have haunted me ever since.”” 3
Quoddy Head
Unframed black ink on paper | 14” W x 11” H | 1973
1 Smee, Sebastian. “Smee Introduction to Through the Looking Glass . Botolph
Club Catalog, 2012.
2 See: L’Arroseur Arrosé. Directed by Louis Lumière and Auguste Lumière.
Performed by Benoît Duval and François Clerc. France, June 10, 1895. Film.
3 Taylor, Robert. “The Haunting of Steven Trefonides.” Boston Globe, March 25,
1980.