Color, pattern, and texture are the key features of Paul Stephen Yanko’s paintings. He has explained his working method in this way: “I develop my paintings systematically through an additive process of layering acrylic paint mixed with acrylic mediums onto masked areas. I initially establish sets of vertical and horizontal bands, applied to either a square or rectangular format, with function as an armature on which subsequent color shapes are layered. As I paint, I allow shapes to shift in registration in order to reveal varying amounts of underlying color.” The end result is not only colorful, but visually dynamic.
Yanko was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and in 1991 obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in illustration/graphic design from the Cleveland Institute. Four years later he was awarded his Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from nearby Kent State University. Between 1996 and 2003 he held teaching positions at the Cleveland Institute, Kent State University, and Oberlin College, all in Ohio. While there he married Enid Williams, and in 2004 he joined the visual arts faculty at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville. The school’s mission “is to serve the artistically talented high school students of South Carolina through programs of pre-professional instruction in an environment of artistic and academic excellence.”
While acrylic has been Yanko’s primary medium for years, he has also done several series of monotypes. Like his paintings, these explore the interaction of shapes and colors, and are consistently abstract. In an artist’s statement he declared: “I am concerned with developing a response to abstraction that addresses nuances of color and surface. My paintings combine depictions of flat and illusionistic space, developed systematically over periods of time that can extend from several months to several years. The surfaces of my work acquire a relief-like quality as I apply acrylic paint mixed with various mediums over collaged surfaces. As configurations of densely clustered shapes emerge, I continually embellish successively smaller shapes over larger underlying rectilinear and geometric shapes, reconciling material fact with visual complexity.”