The Forney Transportation Museum is hardly one of Denver’s premier visual-arts venues. In fact, it’s not usually an art showcase at all.
But a 1998 exhibition at that unlikely Brighton Boulevard site put Stephen Batura on the artistic map in Denver, setting him on a steadily rising career path that led to one of the most prestigious public-art commissions in the city’s history.
In 2004, Denver’s public art program selected the 45-year-old painter to create a $216,000 mural for a prime wall in the lobby of the Ellie Caulkins Opera House, a newly opened opera and dance venue in the Denver Performing Arts Complex.
“There are so many good artists working in Denver. I think Steve is clearly in that very top echelon,” said Dianne Vanderlip, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum.
The Denver-born artist had exhibited elsewhere before the Forney exhibition, but the combination of a more public venue and an imaginative new body of paintings centered on historic train wrecks gained him unprecedented recognition.
“He really hit his stride with that series,” Vanderlip said. “It was a consistent, perfectly executed body of work.”
After seeing those paintings, Ron Judish, a prominent local dealer, immediately agreed to show Batura’s work. He organized a solo exhibition in 2000, where Vanderlip purchased a 6-by-12-foot piece for the Denver Art Museum – “Mid-Winter 1903.”
“At that point, it incorporated everything that he was thinking and doing with historical material, and, at the same time, it showed off this unbelievable kind of flair for being able to paint,” she said. “I just think he is amazing.”
Batura has long combined an old-master interest in narrative with a modern, expressionist approach to paint-handling. In the Forney series, which Batura simply titled, “Disasters,” his style fully gelled.
He begins with photographs, sometimes his own but more often historic images by others. For his recent show at the Robischon Gallery, for example, he used photographer Charles Lillybridge’s 1905-1925 scenes of Denver neighborhoods.
But rather than merely mimic those views, he refracts the imagery through his distinctive artistic aesthetic, distancing it further from reality and giving it new meaning. He dislocates it in time and invests the subject matter with a kind of fictionalized, ambiguous quality.
“I’ve never been interested in trying to approximate realism,” he said. “I’m after an artificial reality. I’m much more interested in theater commenting on life than trying to remove that layer of unreality.”
To realize these often complex conceptions, Batura employs a virtuosic painting technique, said Cydney Payton, director-curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, which presented an off-site exhibition of his paintings in 2003.
“What attracted me to the work,” she said, “is this beautiful, scrim quality, that the work is not immediately, completely revealed, that it’s basically abstraction. And there’s such a delicate and refined use of light, balanced with this kind of aggressive, painterly expression.”
For that scrim quality, Batura employs casein – a versatile, water-based paint – to create low-contrast washes of mostly nonobjective veils of color that give his paintings a muted, sometimes even lonely quality.
“I gray everything, is what happens,” he said. “If I have a red, I’m going to put green in it. If I have blue, I’m going to put orange in it. If I have yellow, I’m going to put purple in it, so that I knock the brilliance out of it.”
After working first as a house painter and later at the Denver Central Library, he was able to quit in 2002 to devote himself full time to art. But Batura believes the money he is earning from the mural will finally give him the financial freedom to take artistic risks he never could before.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever had the opportunity to really take chances,” Batura said. “I’m in position now that I can flesh out all this work that I’ve tried to do for 15 years and see where it’s going to lead.
“That’s what I intend to do – take all these threads of things that are often abandoned, because I don’t think they’ll work in a show and now follow those threads and see what will happen.”
Payton suspects that everything Batura has learned and experienced while realizing the massive mural project will take him in exciting directions that he and people who have followed his work could never have foreseen.
At the same time, Vanderlip hopes Batura will make more concerted efforts to display his paintings outside Denver and gain broader recognition. She believes his work could easily hold its own at prominent art galleries in New York City and elsewhere.
“I think it is just a question of time with him,” Vanderlip said. “I don’t think he is destined to be one of those guys who is very well known in this community and nobody else knows him. I don’t think that is going to happen to him.”
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
