Stephen Fitz-Gerald was born on August 27,1954 in Beloit, Wisconsin. At age two his family moved to Castine ,Maine a rugged island environment of towering granite cliffs, fragrant pines, and panoramic Atlantic seascapes. Few playmates and the remote locale inspired him early in life to incorporate the scenic beauty he saw in his drawings
In the summer of his fifteenth year, Stephen acquired enough money from sales of his watercolor paintings, sketches and silver jewelry to finance the first of several trips to Europe. He traveled alone on motorcycle across France, studying art and architecture and recording his adventures in sketchbooks and journals. Early academic training came at the George School, in Newtown ,Pennsylvania, where he graduated, one of the network of progressive co-educational Quaker boarding schools.
In college at the University of Maine he studied a double major of philosophy and psychology, with a minor in art. After three years, an intense personal interest in the psychic realm caused him to transfer to Sonoma State University in California and study parapsychology, graduating in 1977 with a B.A. in that field.
Stephen learned to weld in 1981 and immediately applied that knowledge to sculpture. In 1983-1984 he co-produced “The Reeds”, a commission of his father’s for the Harrington Cancer Clinic in Amarillo, Texas. Upon his return to California he re-entered S.S.U. and studied art ,becoming a teaching assistant and receiving his second B.A. in 1987. Soon after he was hired by U.C.Berkeley as senior Laboratory Mechanician in the metal sculpture division of the art department.
In 1993 Stephen quit working at U.C.Berkeley and has been a freelance sculptor since that time. Stephen’s abstract sculptures are a synthesis of his own innate aesthetics ,but always informed by forms from nature. Many themes originate from an inherited love of the natural world. Stones, bones, driftwood, and shells are some of the more obvious models for his work. The figurative pieces are inspired by the ancient sculptures of the Golden Age of Greece, which Stephen studied on subsequent trips to Europe..
His father the master sculptor Clark Fitz-Gerald ,has remained his greatest influence as an artist. There is a thread of visual continuity in the work of the father through the son and though his father is now deceased his influence remains…
stephenfitzgeraldfineart[at]yahoo.com
707-584-0182
