contemporary art. He also spent every summer in the mountains of North Carolina, teaching summer classes and painting the woods and hillsides. In 1921, he was invited to join the faculty of Newcomb College in New Orleans where he remained until his retirement in 1948. As in New York, Stevens quickly became part of a community of painters and writers, through which Stevens maintained an active contact with a wide range of ideas and cultural changes, while still quietly pursuing his own idiosyncratic path. Innovator Because of his year-round commitments to Newcomb and various summer schools, Stevens was not able to spend extended lengths of time in the studio. This suited his propensity to wander, work, and teach out-of-doors, and he began to rely on media and methods that encouraged spontaneity. Most of his works were achieved on modestly scaled paper, which could be transported easily and worked on site. The proliferation of modernist issues, occurred coincidentally with Stevens moving away from studio-oriented easel painting and toward the use of more versatile materials and gestural techniques. His reliance on drawing, with charcoal, pastel, and watercolor, led him naturally to place greater importance on the graphic structure of his composition. This new direction also revived Stevens’ earlier interest in Sung painting, and its underlying philosophy of the artist as an extension of nature. He began to experiment with a pastel medium of his own invention, which would also be conducive to a freer creative process. Stevens developed formulas for a fixative and binder, and a whole sequence of emulsions, from tempera with egg and oil to wax, which made his pastel pigments colorfast and virtually unsmudgeable. He used these in such a range of combinations that they are today almost impossible to distinguish. But perhaps his most interesting technical innovation was to allow random strokes and blots of color to float onto and penetrate a prepared wet paper, thus defining of themselves the starting point for the emergence of the final image—this independently of the experiments with accident and chance of the Dada and Surrealist painters His style had become characterized by the direct, gestural application of lines and tones, which were energized by clusters of flickering color notations. This visual shorthand had parallels with some of the most advanced techniques of his day. Influences As an artist, Stevens' interest in nature as subject matter was inspired by his well-documented enthusiasm