
AN UNSINKABLY OFFBEAT ARTIST TAKES SOME UNEXPECTED CUES FROM A MODERNIST ICON
by Edward M. Gómez, with Steven Hirsch
We last heard from brutjournal’s New York-based, contributing artist-photographer Steven Hirsch just a few weeks ago when, while doing his day job, away from the paint-sloshing and communion with his muses that goes on regularly at his studio, he shot a batch of news photos of the arraignment, in court, of Luigi Mangione. Then he made some paintings based on those photographic images.
Young, handsome, and enigmatic, Mangione was arrested and charged with the murder of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in early December. When Hirsch is not creating his paintings and fine-art photo series, he shoots news photos, mostly of actual or alleged criminals, for New York’s tabloid newspapers.

Recently, he let us know about a new series of paintings he has been developing since last summer. Some of them are partly abstract. All of their compositions have been inspired by those of the paintings of the American artist Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), one of the emblematic representatives of the abstract-expressionist movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
In the 1930s, Motherwell briefly studied painting at the California School of Fine Arts (which later became the San Francisco Art Institute) and earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Stanford University. He became one of the most articulate writers of his generation about modern art and earned renown for his series “Elegies to the Spanish Republic.”
to read the whole article.