Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing, Public art
Website: draweverywhere.com
Forest Stearns was born and raised in Sonora, California, where he began drawing and practicing calligraphy alongside his mother, the artist and educator Dianne Stearns. After attending Sonora High School and Columbia College, he enrolled at Humboldt State University (now Cal Poly Humboldt), earning a BFA in painting in 2005 and co-founding the Empire Squared art collective, which staged monthly shows around Humboldt County. He then moved to the Bay Area to pursue an MFA in illustration at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, graduating with honors in 2010 after winning the program’s First Place Award and Directors Choice Award at its 2009 MFA Spring Show.
Stearns went on to work as Art Director and Head Illustrator for the Humboldt-based Fatbol Clothing Company and later as Art Director at DeviantArt Inc. In 2013 he became the first Artist in Residence at the satellite company Planet Labs, where over five years he built an artist-in-residence program and helped engineer a process for laser-etching original artwork — including his own recurring “waveform” design and a series called The Great Migration — onto the panels of more than 300 shoebox-sized “Dove” satellites, work he has described as the first art show in space and discussed in a TEDx talk, “Space Art Dream Remix.”
Since 2018, Stearns has served as Principal Artist and, with Dr. Erik Lucero, co-founder of the Google Quantum AI Artist in Residence program at the company’s quantum computing campus in Santa Barbara, where his large-scale murals and paintings are installed throughout the lab. His other public commissions include the 2022 mural California Remix at Gillis Hall in the California State Library in Sacramento, and a year-long artist residency at the UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley that culminated in the 2026 exhibition The Intention to DRAWEVERYWHERE. He lives and works in Oakland with his partner, Torie Beedle, and their daughter.
Working under the name DRAWEVERYWHERE, Stearns produces large-scale murals, paintings, and illustration-based work that he describes as an “Illuminated Practice” — dense, linework-driven compositions in saturated color that read like stained glass, built up from decades of sketchbook drawing. His practice is defined by collaboration across disciplines outside the traditional gallery system, from aerospace engineers to quantum physicists, and by a recurring interest in dissolving the boundary between artwork, architecture, and the natural world: murals are sited to interact with daylight and views of the surrounding landscape, and recurring motifs (waveforms, mycelium networks, California biomes) tie the technical subject matter of each commission back to organic form.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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