What could a painting be if it could take any shape or form?

That question was circulating in the art-world air when Steven Cushner studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1970s. Back then, winds were gusting toward conceptual art, which challenges the conventional notion that a material object is the goal behind a work of art.

“Once you open the door to conceptual art,” Cushner reasons, “the idea of making a painting or a picture of something doesn’t make sense anymore.” The artist went on to earn a master of fine arts degree from the University of Maryland, and was fortunate in his thesis advisor—renowned artist Sam Gilliam, whose response to the zeitgeist was brilliantly colored, draped canvases.

Where did it lead for Cushner? In graduate school, he discovered fellow painters and teachers, “who were going through the same thing I was going through—kind of inventing their own languages as I was trying to invent mine,” he remembers. It took 15 years for the DC artist to find a personal vocabulary, which has endured over three decades.

His paintings, large-scale and muscular, bristle with grand motifs that appear to float on textured backgrounds. These central subjects often reference landscape painting, flattened and simplified into abstract patterns. Color struts from brashly singular to rainbow-hued, or may be absent entirely, replaced by swirling black lines and drips. Dominant subjects are typically shown in pairs or in a symmetrical or orderly progression—illustrating raw energy in balance.

Periodically, Cushner revisits motifs that mirror his own patterns. “If you look at my paintings, you wouldn’t sense—because how could you—that I’ve been married to the same person for many, many years, lived in the same house for many, many years, do the same things day after day for many, many years. That’s just my nature. I like repetitive things,” he observes. “It’s hard-wired in me. And it’s in my paintings.”

Alert, bespectacled and slight in stature, the painter carries an outsized presence on canvas. To complete a commission for the American Embassy in Ankara, Turkey—his largest painting to date, reaching 30 feet high and 10 feet wide—Cushner borrowed a 10-foot ladder and attached a stick to extend the paintbrush. “I’m much happier working large,” says the artist, who credits post-war Abstract Expressionists for his love of physical painting gestures.

Cushner works simultaneously on big canvases and smaller paper. Moving back and forth between the two, he determines, among other decisions, “the kind of space I want to create for the subject to exist in.” To change things up, he might try out a new medium, like wood-cut printing, or one that he hasn’t used for a while, such as watercolor. His goal: “How do I translate something that I already know through a material that is a new challenge for me?” For inspiration, he’ll search through small sketchbooks, sometimes turning his doodles upside down. “Inevitably, it triggers something—‘Oh, I could do this pattern in this particular way,’” he reflects, “and that becomes the start of another painting.”

The artist invariably experiments as he works. Colors are tested out. He prefers thinned acrylic paint to prevent it from building up, and to retain what he calls “the feel of the canvas.” Still, a single piece may entail hundreds of paint layers, as prior decisions are rethought. “I’m putting down the line, and then I’m painting over the line. I’m correcting the drawing and the spacing. I like a sense of gesture, but I want to control the gesture. And when the painting is finished, I want it to look almost as if it just kind of happened,” he explains, adding that for him, “The best discoveries happen in the process of painting.”

A few years ago, Cushner began to wonder if the studio attached to the back of his house in DC’s Brookland neighborhood would be the last he would ever work in. He turned to a friend, architect David Jameson. Their collaboration produced a separate studio that now stands like a beckoning temple atop the hill behind his house. Its 14-foot-tall, projecting glass entrance faces a similar new glass extension on the back of the house, his former studio converted to a family room.

Jameson’s top priority was that the studio and house renovation “speak to each other,” he says. His design won a 2024 Award of Excellence from American Institute of Architects Northern Virginia.

Along the sloping site between the studio and house, Jameson placed huge stepping stones, “reminiscent of the repeated forms in Steven’s work,” the architect observes. A collector of Cushner’s art, Jameson finds their approaches similar. “I like the conceptual nature and singular vision of his work. It doesn’t stray too far from my own beliefs,” he notes, concluding, “You could consider us both conceptual minimalists.”

Cushner’s art is available through Hemphill in DC (hemphillartworks.com) and Reynolds Gallery in Richmond (reynoldsgallery.com). For more information, visit cushnerama.com.