Stephen Warde Anderson

b. 1953

Born in 1953 in Rockford, Illinois where he has spent all but a few years of his life, Stephen Warde Anderson has been working full-time and exhibiting nationally for over twenty years. Anderson is a self-taught, Midwestern Outsider artist whose acrylic paintings depict whimsical worlds inhabited by fairies, mermaids, aliens, fabulous creatures, and glamorous ladies, often in distress, as well as also creating a body of work of historical portraits. Initially, Anderson used the type of tempera paint found in grade school classrooms, but he let the paint harden and then re-liquefied it with saliva and applied it with needles and plastic styluses. The unusual technique attracted the attention of folk art collectors, and over time more people began paying attention to his whimsical tableaus and brightly colored portraits of historical figures.  Executed in a style best described as naive classicism, his work is characterized by bright colors, strong lines, stylized, formal composition, and with its mix of fairytale- like fantasy, humor, and social comment presents an ingenuous romanticism free of parody or irony. ²