Biography

Steven Goldleaf has studied painting at Columbia University, and last exhibited his work at the Huntington Arts Council Gallery in September of 2018, where his painting “Body of Liza” was awarded Honorable Mention and has shown at the Turtle Press Gallery in the Woolworth Building in New York City in 2010 and 2011. He has had residencies at the Edward Albee Foundation’s William Flanagan Creative Persons' Center; the Woodstock Artists' Guild, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and the MacDowell Colony, and his illustrations have appeared in DER FATALE GLAUBE AN DAS GLÜCK (The Fatal Believer in Luck ) by Rainer Moritz , Random House, Germany, 2012. In 2005, he curated a show at the Hofstra Museum of Art. “My series of oil paintings of nudes on clothing began around 2009 and continued through 2018,” he says. “I ended up painting well over a hundred of these, but this series began when in a museum, my younger daughter asked me what canvas was made out of. I told her, “Linen,” and she asked further “Like clothing? You could paint on a t-shirt?” A few years later, I decided to see if I could and I painted several landscapes, still lifes, portraits, before I hit on the idea of painting nudes roughly conforming to the part of the clothing I was painting on: torsos on jackets, legs on skirts, and so forth. This project became more challenging as I painted more and more ambitious paintings, and I would say the final three or four dozen works (most of which are on this website) are very satisfying.”