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Stephen Tanis was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1945.
When he was thirteen, he began private study with Arthur Maynard, a realist painter and student of Frank Dumond of the Art students League in NYC. After High School, Tanis served for three years in the U. S. Marine Corps. He returned for further study with Maynard and went on to the University of Cincinnati where he earned a BFA in painting. In 1972, he received a Masters degree in Fine Arts from the Cranbrook Academy of Art studying with painter, George Ortman. Although Tanis experimented with abstraction, most of his earliest works were figures and straightforward still-life. Returning to the east coast, working as a carpenter, Tanis scaled down his work for lack of a studio space, concentrating on drawing and pastels. In 1972, he joined the University of Delaware art faculty where he taught figure drawing and painting.
While on his first sabbatical leave, Tanis and his family established themselves in Almuñécar, Spain. In Spain, he focused on a series of more elaborate still-lives that forecast the way he was going to work for the next decade. In 1980, he had a solo show of the Spanish paintings at the Jane Haslem Gallery in Washington, DC. In 1985, Tanis and family moved to Florence, Italy where a new direction in his work evolved.
In 2001, Tanis left teaching in order to devote all of his time to painting. He is a University of Delaware Professor Emeritus.
In 2001, The State of Delaware awarded Tanis both a Governor’s Award in the Arts and a Masters Individual Fellowship Award in the Arts.
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