Stephen Duren grew up in the amber light of northern California. He moved to West Michigan in 1978 where he taught for six years at various colleges before settling into his full time vocation as a painter.Duren dances between abstraction and realism. Chicago Tribune critic Alan Artner lauded the “modest, unaffected freshness” of his small plein-air landscape paintings. New City critic Nathan Matteson wrote “The work that shows him at his best is the kind that crosses those useless boundaries of representational and abstract.”Duren has been the subject of more than 40 one-person exhibitions and honored with over 30 art prizes. His paintings hang in the permanent collections of museums and universities, and more than 60 foundations and corporations, and innumerable private collections in America and abroad. His painting “Woman by Bed” can be viewed in the permanent collection of the Grand Rapids Art Museum.