Steve Harlow - beginnings of an artist


	Steve HARLOW An artist who uses photography as a painter's tool.	A childhood interest in modern painting and a photographer father, allowed Steve Harlow to experience art throughout his Los Angeles, California upbringing. He helped his father set up studio shots and he helped him print in the darkroom. He used a pinhole camera his father made from a cigar box. (continued below)


	At the early age of 6, Steve was attracted to the Jackson Pollack paintings he first saw in a 1949 issue of Life magazine and adopted Jackson as his hero. Although throwing paint around on the garage floor was too much for his mother, young Steve was allowed to draw large abstract patterns in colored chalk on the cement driveway of the working-class family's home in South Gate. At the age of 12, Steve began ventures into the art world, riding street cars into downtown L.A. and Venice Beach. He took in exhibits of modern painting at L. A. County Museum of Art, seeing Pollack and the New York abstract expressionist's paintings in person. Significantly, he also saw work of the San Francisco figurative painters Elmer Bishoff, Richard Diebenkorn, and David Park. In Venice, Steve met the writer Lawrence Lipton, who one day asked 13 year old Steve to do a chalk drawing on the cement outside the famous beat performance cafe, "The Gaslight". This was the first exhibition of Steve Harlow's artwork and his first commission. Throughout five decades, Steve Harlow has attempted to synthesize the New York and San Francisco schools of painting and further the work through the use of photography as a painting tool.