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Norman Stevens was born in Bradford where he assisted his father in his work as a signwriter and studied at Bradford Regional College of Art, 1952-57. His period of study there was especially fruitful for his artistic development as his talented fellow students and friends included David Hockney, David Oxtoby, Mike Vaughan and John Loker. Upon leaving Bradford Stevens studied at the Royal College of Art for a further three years where his tutors included Ceri Richards and he won the Lloyd Landscape Scholarship and the Abbey Minor Travelling Scholarship.
Stevens taught at art schools in Manchester, Maidstone and Hornsey before becoming Gregory Fellow at Leeds University (1974-75). In the mid 1970s he gave up teaching to become a fulltime artist, winning the Chichester Arts Festival Prize (1975) and an award at the prestigious John Moore’s Exhibition, Liverpool (1983).
In 1970 Stevens took up printmaking and rapidly mastered many different printmaking processes to such effect that the art historian David Buckman has written, the 1970s saw Stevens’ international reputation grow, and he was increasingly admired for his superb technical ability as a printmaker, mastering such difficult and unfashionable techniques as the mezzotint.
Stevens exhibited regularly at the British International Print Biennale in Bradford, being a prize winner there in 1979 and 1982. Abroad his prints were shown at Geneva (1974), in a British Council Touring Exhibition of Scandinavia (1977) and, in 1982, the European Print Biennale at Baden Baden and the Bilbao Print Biennale. In 1987, following the now infamous gale, Stevens was commissioned by Pirelli to make a print of Kew Garden’s fallen walnut tree, the proceeds going to the latter’s Storm Fund appeal. His prints of gardens and trees became something of a speciality, for example his studies of Kew and Kensington Gardens.
His Shadowed Garden plates are in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Gallery and the Arts Council also have examples of his work. Stevens was elected a Royal Academician in 1987 but unfortunately died the following year. The Redfern Gallery, London held retrospective exhibitions of his work in 1989 and 2003, the latter being devoted to his printmaking. |
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