Artist's Bio

Stephen B. MacInnis lives and works in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, where he was born and raised.

A painter, for the past several years he has been working on a long-term project entitled Long Series, a series of over 1,300, 12×12 inch mixed media paintings. It is his plan to complete 10,000 paintings in this series.

The Long Series is primarily mixed media on paper. Each piece is constrained to roughly 12×12 inches. Within the series the exploration of drawing, painting, collage, and unusual materials such as tape, objects, and found papers are exploited. The use of accident, contrivance, simulation, and collaboration with other artists and the public have also been utilized. The project explores the effects of a long-term project on the development of a personal iconography. Certain marks such as cross-hatching, stains, ink rings, decoration, and scribbling are intentionally carried throughout the series. Because of the length of the project, when a new mark or idea occurs it is often developed into a series within the series and explored to completion and then moved on from.

Stephen works prolifically in an almost mass-production manner, with several hundred Long Series pieces in progress at any time. From pieces with early simple marks, to pieces heavily worked and nearing completion, the work piles up. Each day, Stephen selects one or two and finishes them.

The progress of the Long Series has been recorded online in a studio diary called Painter’s Progress in which he records the daily activities and interests of a working artist.