Steven Hubbard was born in London and studied at Gloucestershire College of Art and Design. He has exhibited widely in commercial galleries and, in recent years, at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
His career has encompassed a variety of disciplines. Initially he created water colour still lives before developing a successful portrait career. After being shortlisted for the National Portrait Gallery BP Award, and gaining an award from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual exhibition, he completed many commissions, including a series of portraits for the eminent writer, NPG trustee and Cambridge don Sir John Plumb (1911-2001).
With some of his portraits he began to create tabernacle frames influenced by his love of 15th and 16th century Italian art, and these craft-based elements soon developed into a more personal and idiosyncratic area of endeavour. These new works, combining painting, carving, gilding and construction led to Hubbard becoming a gallery artist at the Francis Kyle Gallery in Mayfair from 1995 until it’s closure in 2014, with works going into private collections across the UK and Europe. Public collections include The Royal Holloway, The National Extension College and The Museum in the Park, Stroud.
Always interested in technique and new ways of making work, a long-standing interest in the now ubiquitous prints of the Grosvenor School of printmakers from the 1930s saw Hubbard begin to experiment with what has become his main focus of attention, the possibilities of the essentially simple printing form of Lino printing. Using multiple blocks, thin Japanese papers, extended inks and the flexibility of hand printing, these Lino prints use simple means to produce complex and varied surfaces and textures where, within an almost uniform edition, each print has very slight variations and subtleties which makes it unique.
