Stephen
Daly

Biography
For me, the artistic path began in grammar school with a desire to become a classical musician. With some years of private lessons and practice on an instrument I learned about structure and discipline but knew I would forever be a practitioner and not the creator I wanted to be. I found the inventiveness that would satisfy this need in a painting class halfway through high school in Menlo Park, California.
The truly formative years for me artistically were those spent in undergraduate and graduate studies at San Jose State University and Cranbrook Academy of Art, respectively. San Jose State University had a very active art department and was close enough to the San Francisco Bay Area to allow plenty of museum, gallery, and studio visits. My struggle during this period was to find a medium I liked and determine what my artistic voice was to be. In San Jose, and again at Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, I explored the mysteries of metal casting and found a formal and visual language in a machine/man, machine/animal synthesis much expanded and grounded a few years later during a two-year grant period (on the Prix de Rome) at the American Academy in Rome where I could work, look and think all the time.
My first teaching position at the University of Minnesota was followed by almost a decade at Humboldt State Univ. in Northern California (less the 2 years in Rome) central Texas. The move to Texas, to fill a position in sculpture at the University, saw the introduction of a distinctly figurative element in my sculpture and the beginning of drawing as an art form (as opposed to sketches for sculpture). The concepts of “situational” work and of “particulated” imagery (many independent forms working as a whole) continue today. Ideas swirl around how we communicate with each other and with the natural world.