Raised in Chicago, Stephen Schousen recalls growing up around Frank Lloyd Wright homes. Even as a small child, he was drawn to their minimal decor and extreme geometry. Today, using a printing method almost five centuries old, Schousen combines images of architecture and nature to produce intriguing series of intaglios. Walls, doors, arches and floors, etched or engraved with engineer-like precision, juxtapose organic objects rich in shape and texture. Inviting the viewer to enter a dense collage of distorted and fragmented images, Schousen challenges us to identify and consummate disjointed figures suggested among small groups of arranged abstract forms. The collage of many images onto one plate and the distortion of an image into an unreadable abstraction, Schousen believes, parallel the processes of thinking and dreaming, of design and the ordering of space - a metaphor of the human mind.The initial spark for much of Schousen's work is simply his direct reactions on copper plates to a small group of forms and shapes he finds visually compelling. He then masterfully employs a variety of intaglio processes to explore and develop the suggested abstract shapes, textures and tones from the original image. Any successful or gripping fragments of representational form from the initial drawing are developed and, at times, repeated to create the final ordered and rhythmic product.Schousen received a Bachelor of Arts from Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio and studied Life Drawing and Printmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. He went on to graduate from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst with a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking. Currently an Associate Professor of Art at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he divides his time between his family and teaching.