Steven Pennock “Penn” Eastburn (b.1990, Wilmington, DE) is a painter currently based in Baltimore, MD. His work explores the accidental beauty and abstraction of ordinary, often overlooked spaces and materials found in the urban landscape.

Penn received his MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2022.

Raised in Maryland, he attended St.Paul’s School and received his Bachelor of Arts in Film and a BA in New Media from the University of Utah in 2012.

Artist Statement:

In my paintings, looping patterns become emotional anchors for vintage photographs. I find the photographs, often late-19th and early-20th century gelatin silver or platinum prints, in public domain archives and reprint them on informal, oversized printing paper. Just as, within the gelatin silver print-making process, the photograph's image is suspended in an emulsion, these printed reproductions hover within the canvas’s painted space. Although glued directly to the surface (akin to wheat-pasted posters found throughout the urban landscape), the paper seems to embed itself into the picture plane. Here, abstract attitudes meet formal photographic qualities, torn paper meets topology, and the distinction between different kinds of spaces creates an expectation-breaking tension.

My approach, varying in order, includes bleaching, dying, sanding, sewing, weaving, and a folding of the canvas similar to the pliage technique of Simon Hantaï. The ability to access each open side from any angle, above and below, lays the groundwork on which I can search for order, for pattern, for regularity, and for rhythm. With an emphasis on letting the paint be paint, my initial process opens a direct conversation with the materials and avoids locking into an image prematurely.

The process inevitably leaves behind evidence of the means by which it arrived, and I embrace mistakes as if they were intentional. The final paintings are the embodiment of dreams, feelings I can’t express with words, open to interpretation by all. The work is me, mindfully spiraling out to the world.