Canadian painter Stephen X. Arthur is a former independent experimental animator, screenwriter, and technical writer. He has an MFA degree in film production (U. Southern California), a BSc in biology, and an MSc in neuroscience (U. British Columbia). As an INTJ personality type, his strength is introverted intuition; from age 66 to 71 he was an intuitive painter. He usually created Surrealist Symbolist paintings (see especially Book One), where the spontaneous figurative images often produced a kind of cinematic narrative with unexpected meanings and layers of ambiguity that make people think and feel beyond their conventional assumptions.

Arthur had one curated solo exhibition and two juried group exhibitions. Seven paintings have been sold (numbers 16, 37, 87, 91, 105, 108, and 111); 51 paintings are owned by 19 private collectors; 14 have been lost.

For the majority of these paintings—mainly in Book One—we might ask: Are these fine art or are these illustrations? Do they appear to be pure Surrealism only because they are illustrations that fail to communicate? Are they like the multileveled lyrics of a David Byrne song? Or was the artist often acting as a kind of modern shaman—the wounded healer—carrying out Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey”?

Selected paintings are presented in chronological sequence as indicated by the number given in each painting title. Book One covers May 2021 through January 2025 (144 paintings). Book Two covers February 2025 to March 2026.