Born and brought up in Northumberland, Ian Stephenson’s works retain memories of the great landscapes and open skies of the county, reticently revealed in the boundlessness of his works. Stephenson’s paintings appear both internally and externally infinite with the constellation-like masses each formed by singular and intentional dots of paint. There is, in the purportedly random marks of paint, something of the order within the chaotic cosmos. Such ideas reflect his Romantic sensibilities. Although Stephenson’s use of isolated dots rather that brushstrokes owes much to the pointillist works of George Seurat, he considered himself a painter within the British Romantic tradition. Stephenson drew regularly from the literary sources of writers and poets, notably William Wordsworth whose meditations on the ephemeral state of the wind, sun, rain, and clouds, come forth in Stephenson’s elemental palette.