Steve Mennie was born in Revelstoke, British Columbia and was educated at the Ontario College of Art. After working as a freelance editorial illustrator for a number of years, he returned to B.C. in 1970. Since that time, Mennie has worked in various media, and has shown his work nationally and internationally. His work has been included in the collections of B.C. Tel, Weyerhaeuser Canada Ltd., Ernst and Young, and in the Bronfman Collection, Montreal. In addition, Steve Mennie has twice been commissioned by Canada Post to design commemorative postage stamps.
All of Steve Mennie's work is marked by an interest in reality, and much of his work reveals a very unique sense of humour. Mennie uses either oils or acrylics on canvas to capture sharp planes of light and dark. He manages to simultaneously imbue foliage, pavement and architecture with solidity and transparency. In this new series, the "Spawn" paintings have singular beauty. The micro views are meticulously rendered. Tide marks in the sand and beach pebbles beg to be touched for their textures. In fact, the paintings have gained in presence as they have become less objective.
In part this results from his shift from a wide-angle view to a micro inspection. As the eye moves closer, the content takes on a more abstract guise which reveals Mennie's love of the substance of paint itself.
Throughout his career, he has experimented with a variety of media, including hand-pulled silkscreen, acrylic, oil, and/or watercolor, some of which are apparent in the following works