Faculty and staff

Canadian artist Randall Steeves was born in Saint John, New Brunswick. He studied at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick and received an MFA from The University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia. Since then, he has been based in the Vancouver area. He has lectured and led workshops at art galleries, colleges and universities across Western Canada and has exhibited his work internationally. Randall has been a faculty member at the University of the Fraser Valley’s School of Creative Arts since 2020.

Steeves' paintings invite the viewer to reconsider the gesture of painting itself. The canvases—thickly painted, scratched, and gouged—explore the relationship between the photographic index and the painterly trace with a wry nod towards conceptual art practice.

Encaustic, or beeswax mixed with pigment, is Steeves’ medium of choice. The physicality of the encaustic medium is reinforced by surface interference in the form of large renderings of fingerprints. The prints are often the artist’s own — he had himself ‘processed’ by the Vancouver Police department in preparation for this work — and they serve to remind us not only of the existence of the painter, but of the substance of the painting itself. The subject, from flat fields of monochromatic color to a range of personal and iconic representational imagery and collage, becomes secondary and is replaced by the unvarnished gesture and physical intention of the painter as the loci of exchange.

Teaching specializations: Painting and Drawing