Stephen was born in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1956. It wasn’t until he was 22 and living in Los Angeles that he began to draw, and soon after, to paint. He studied at Parsons School of Design and has shown extensively both in California and New England since the early 1980s. His award-winning paintings in alkyds are unique in their personal vision of the quotidian.Today, Coyle resides in in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The focus of his paintings is the stuff of his everyday life: beds, roadways, kitchen tables, cars, tricycles, ironing boards. Perceived through his personal experience and portrayed on canvas, Coyle endows each element in his compositions with a place of importance and an historical significance.“Spending a day at the beach is comparable to spending a day at the zoo. The way we observe the wildlife at the zoo is akin to the way we slyly observe one another at the beach. I want these paintings to be a summation of humanity through our poses and gestures. The beach is where we are closest to our natural state at birth: naked and vulnerable. The spacing between each figure and each figurative grouping is important. The space and distance between us are where the stories are told. The beach paintings are an examination of us as we walk, crawl, run, crouch, and lie upon the earth. The beach is humanity’s anthill. The building paintings echo the emotions of those that live within and the phone paintings symbolize the loneliness of the human experience.” – Stephen Coyle