Steve Budington works on projects in painting and ecological landscape design. His research examines the local and immediate relationships we have with landscapes we inhabit, visit, and impact, along with the cultural structures that shape our perceptions of nature and place.

”My paintings often include 2 stacked canvases, shaped framing elements, and different approaches to building the surface and image in each work. I resist ‘unified’ images even as I look for connections and relational tensions among the elements.

The landscape as idea and reality drives all my work and research. My direct encounters and memory hang together with cultural and scientific representations. I paint from life, from memory, and utilize culturally based forms such as lidar and elevation mapping, weather data, and signal flags. I start with landscapes that I know. A landscape is often more than one thing at once, and it’s more than its visual appearance. I often feel like a realist painter forced to search for other methods of working.”

Steve Budington holds an MFA in painting and printmaking from the Yale School of Art and a BFA in painting and art history from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with additional studies at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. Budington has shared his work nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in Vienna, Austria, at the ClubClub Wien; in New York, at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, Fordham University, and Exit Art; San Francisco, at the Mirus Gallery; Los Angeles, at Whittier College; and in Italy, at the Fondazione Ambrosetti Arte Contemporanea. Closer to home the artist has shared work at the Hall Art Foundation in Reading Vermont, and the Hesterly Black in Waterbury. Budington received a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant in 2019-20 and has been awarded residencies at the Hotel Pupik in Schrattenberg, Austria, the Monhegan Island Artist in Residence, in Maine, and a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center. Budington has taught as an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, The Herron School of Art and Design, and currently at the University of Vermont, where he is Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing. Outside of his teaching and studio work, Budington creates improvised music with a Middlebury-based collective, volunteers as an extension master gardener, and designs public and private landscapes and gardens. Budington with his family in Shelburne, VT.