Clintel Steed
Clintel Steed was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he was raised in a Pentecostal church where his grandmother was the pastor. There, he experienced many emotions and saw lives changed by the belief in and passion for God existing. His first memories of painted images go back to the reproductions that his mother had hanging in the house. There was the Mona Lisa and Goya’s portrait of a boy in red, in the Metropolitan Museum. These images would stay with him forever.
From 1995 to 1999, Steed attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where his life was changed forever. He focused on figure painting and painting from perception for the entire four years he studied there. Steed would go on to finish graduate school at Indiana University, from 1999 to 2001, and do advanced research at the New York Studio School, from 2001 to 2004. Since 2005 Steed has taught and been a visiting artist at the New York Studio School and Harold Washington College and recently in 2017 at the Vermont Studio Center. Starting in 2007 and continuing to the present, Steed has given numerous critiques and lectures, the Rhode Island School Of Design and the University of Delaware being the most recent. In 2015, he received the prestigious award for a “young figurative painter” from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Steed continues to paint from perception. He is very much affected by daily events and history as it is unfolding in the present. He uses the events and character of our time as a source and inspiration for his paintings.
Steed recently participated in final critiques at the New York Studio School, where he was able to speak about the intellectual pursuit of being a painter. He hopes he was able to convey his own lifelong passionate engagement to a younger generation of future artists.