Stephen Halko grew up in Historic Old New Castle, in Delaware.  He recalls a specific event from his child hood that provides a clue to his working process.  “When I was young I loved to go to ‘Olde New Castle Day’.  The people who lived in historic houses would dress in period costumes and open their homes to the public.  I could experience the present through the costumes of the past.  This gave my childhood the duality of living in both the 18th and 19th centuries as well as my everyday experience of the 20th.”  It is with one foot in the past and one in the present that Stephen makes his paintings.  He utilizes the traditional techniques of oil painting, while exploring his present day experience.

Working in a representational tradition, Stephen Halko’s recent paintings have moved away from the figure as the focal point to the depiction of animals as the primary source of metaphor.  “I have always been interested in the relationship between human beings and the experience of being alive, specifically; who are we and why are we here?  To answer these questions, in much of my new work, I have used animals as a surrogate for the human figure.  Animals are like us in that we are both mortal and share the experience of life and death.  When we observe them we see traces of ourselves and feel as if we know them on some level.  Yet there is a divide between man and animal, a gulf of unknowing between civilization and the wild, as if we were more like them in the not so distant past, but have lost a vital connection to them.  We have no shared syntax or language to bridge this gap and the animal remains elusive, becoming abstract, a symbol for life that has no words.  It is in this realm, beyond words, that I am exploring the experience of my life”

Stephen Halko lives and maintains a studio in Philadelphia.  He graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in 2007.  He teaches Painting, Drawing, and Design at Stockton College, Painting, and Art History at Lincoln University and Landscape Painting in the Young Artists Workshop at Moore College of Art.