Absolutely stunning! Framed it measures approximately approximately 18x14 1/2” and image measures 2 1/2x6 1/2”. Though signature is difficult to read, accompanying documentation indicates this piece is by Steven L. Sles and is a silkscreen on paper from 1969. Please see photos for details and additional information on back of the piece and thank you for your interest!

Artist bio

“Steven Sles was a painter, a composer and a poet.One thing he was not: handicapped.Though cerebral palsy caused a lack of muscle control that required him to use a wheelchair for much of his life, Sles didn't find his neuromuscular condition confining. He traveled the world as an internationally recognized artist, married, had a child and launched a second career as a composer.For Sles, it was the finished painting or composition that was important. He didn't want people to focus on the way he conveyed paint to canvas using a brush clinched between his teeth or the way he coaxed musical notes from a keyboard using his foot.”I don't paint with my mouth, I paint with my soul," Sles said in a 1991 Tucson Citizen article.Sles was passionate about his art and wanted to leave an eclectic and meaningful body of work, said friend and fellow composer Robert Prakash Rai. "Steven was never one to be constrained by what he couldn't do," Rai said. "Steven, first and foremost, was an explorer of art. "As an artist, he felt a duty to use his talents to provoke thought."When Sles died of congestive heart failure on Oct. 24, he left as his legacy a portfolio of 9,000 paintings, two CDs of original music with a third CD yet to be released, thousands of pages of poems and an unfinished memoir. He was 68.Sles was born in New Jersey in 1940, when schools weren't required to make accommodations for students with special needs. It would be 50 years before the Americans With Disabilities Act became law. His father, an attorney, was part of the grass-roots movement to start the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation.Though Sles wasn't paralyzed, muscle spasms caused involuntary movements, preventing him from steadily holding a pencil or a paintbrush. By the time he was 6, though, the budding artist had found a way to draw and paint by clasping chalk, pen or paintbrush between his teeth.”I have an unusual degree of control," he said in the 1991 article. "Even the involuntary movement may become part of the lines."Despite a superior intellect that would lead him to learn six languages, Sles still had to fight biases of the day, when those with disabilities were thought to have little to offer society.Sles ignored the high school art teacher and the guidance counselor who told him to give up his dreams. When he was 15, Sles studied under abstract painter Hans Hofmann, before attending Bard College, graduating from Swarthmore College and traveling the world — Martinique, France, Spain, Mexico — and studying at the University of Madrid, Mexico's Instituto Allende, Mexico City College and the Art Students League of New York.Sles worked in multiple media — oils, casein, aniline dyes, silkscreen inks, stained glass — and painted in a variety of styles, evocative of some of the world's most celebrated abstract, expressionist and impressionist painters. Subjects were as varied as his media — landscapes, figures, faces and even colorful, opaque abstract eruptions of watercolor.In my work, I am expressing very inward things," Sles said in a 1977 Star article.His art has been displayed in public and private collections in nearly 50 countries, including a permanent collection at Buckingham Palace. Sles was included in 18 American and International "Who's Who" editions, and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London.It was while living in Spain that Sles met his future wife, Ana, a ballet dancer. The union lasted 22 years, and even divorce couldn't dampen the couple's mutual admiration, said their daughter, Harmony Serlin. "Even toward the end, when my parents were getting a divorce, he loved my mom and me very much and she cared for him very much, too," she said.The couple moved to Tucson in the mid-1970s.I remember watching him paint and he would try to teach me little things when I was a kid," Serlin said.Sles gave up painting to concentrate on poetry and music by the mid-1990s. Years of holding a brush in his mouth and contorting his body to paint canvases had aggravated his scoliosis, making it difficult and painful to continue painting.His compositions, which Sles referred to as "tone poems" in a 2007 Star article, are classical and New Age in nature. He also wrote oratorios — dramatic musical compositions, usually set to a religious text, that are akin to operas, but without staging and costumes.Sles was a self-described "unconventional modern Hasidic Jew," according to a profile in his alma mater's Swarthmore College Bulletin. "Steven was a student of the Torah. He loved his Jewish faith and his beginnings, but he honored all forms of religion," said friend Ann Quinlan of Massachusetts.Composer Rai was a University of Arizona music student in 1994 when he met Sles. The artist was looking for formal music training. "The exploration of music for Steven was a very private journey," Rai said. "If one person heard his work, if 100 million heard his work, it didn't matter. He had a need to express. I think he surprised himself in what he did accomplish. His compositions were unconventional, to be sure."Though sometimes temperamental, as artists are wont to be, Sles was not angry about his physical condition.We're all formed physically as the Creator desires. Those who are aware of that have full lives," he said in the '07 article.It was a message Sles imparted to his daughter. "He left the mark on the world that he wanted to," she said”