Aleta Steward began drawing and painting as a child. She studied briefly at the Art Students League in New York City, but her formative painting years were spent in northern California. When she relocated her studio to Cape Cod in 1987, she applied her observational skills to the local coastal habitat which included herons, plovers, and ospreys, as well as the songbirds which remain her central subject. She has won major prizes from the New England Woodcarving and Wildlife Art Expo in 1993 and 1994, and from the Massachusetts Audubon Society in 1994 and 1995.
Over the past few years, Steward’s paintings have been changing to reflect her solution to a compositional problem that is particularly relevant to wildlife artists working in a highly realistic style.
Steward has increasingly tended to defocus and
