Norman Stevens was a printmaker, a painter, a draughtsman and a teacher, born in Bradford. He studied at Bradford Regional College of Art, in 1952-57, after three years at Bradford Junior Art School. He also assisted his father, a sign writer. Between 1957 and 1960, he was at the Royal College of Art, his teachers including Ceri Richards. He won the Lloyd Landscape Scholarship and the Abbey Minor Travelling Scholarship. Stevens was later to win the Chichester Arts Festival Prize, in 1975, and awards at the British International Print Biennale in 1979 and John Moores Exhibition in Liverpool in 1983. From 1960 to 1967 Stevens taught painting at the Manchester College of Art. The year 1965 was significant, for Stevens undertook a 7,000 miles Greyhound Bus tour of America, recording it in photographs and drawings. He also has a one-man show at Mercury Gallery. Stevens taught at Maidstone College of art between 1967 and 1970, at Hornsey College of Art between 1970 and 1973. In 1974-5 Stevens was Gregory Fellow at the University of Leeds. The 1970s saw Stevens’ international reputation grow, and he was increasingly admired for his superb technical ability as a printmaker, mastering such difficult and unfashionable techniques as the mezzotint. His The Shadowed Garden plates are in the Victoria & Albert Museum collection, and Tate Gallery and Arts Council also hold his work. Clapboard houses, Venetian blinds, Stonehenge and landscape dappled by light and shadow were typical Stevens’s subjects.
Lord Broughshane
London, Hanover Gallery, 1969 London, Redfern Gallery, 1986