Throughout
his life, Steve McMillan has been inspired and sustained by the natural world
and has spent much of his time outside. Whether
it’s a bike ride in the Sonoma
countryside, or a month-long backpacking trip in the High Sierra, he is renewed
and invigorated by being in and moving through landscape. It is this sense of renewal that he seeks to share with others through
his art.
Born in Berkeley , California on December 21st 1949 , he was raised in a home that had a sweeping view of the San Francisco Bay . This scene kindled his interest in landscape and was one of his earliest drawing subjects. He had his first one man show when he was sixteen.
Steve
studied at the University of California , Santa
Cruz , and
for one year at Hornsey College of Art in London , England , where
he concentrated on sculpture. It was
at Santa
Cruz , in
1969, that Steve was first introduced to etching. Since he received his BFA from UCSC in 1975, he has focused on creating
aquatint etchings of wilderness landscapes, drawn freehand from photographs he
has taken.
His search for interesting images has taken him all over California , the American West, and to remote regions of Finland , New Zealand and Nepal . In 1988 he backpacked the 212-mile John Muir Trail, starting in Yosemite Valley and ending at the summit of Mount Whitney . From this hike, he created a series of seventeen aquatints.
From 1975 to 1979 he worked at Graphic
Arts Workshop in
San Francisco
. For most of the years from 1979 to
1992 he was an artist in residence at Kala Institute
in
Berkley
, where he taught classes in printmaking, and wrote three technical articles
about aquatint etching. In 1992 he
moved to
Petaluma
, where he continues to create images of the landscapes he loves.
