Stephen Goddard (born 1951 in Altadena, California) made his first prints as a child enrolled in art class at the Pasadena Art Museum. He later studied printmaking at Pasadena City College, Grinnell College, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and the University of Iowa. During his career as curator of prints & drawings at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas he gained additional technical knowledge from his colleagues and collaborators in the printmaking department. Since his retirement in 2019 he has worked in his studio in Estes Park,Colorado.

My recent etchings and engravings have focused on the remains of trees observed in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. I do not think of these as stumps or logs since those terms conjure up human intervention with axes and saws. I consider them more as ruins or as horizontal trees, having succumbed to old age, disease, beetle infestations or fire, often amplified by the myriad ramifications of climate change. As they slowly return to the earth they reveal much of their beautifully complex biological structure as well as their co-existence with other life forms.