His background as a doctor, and as nephew of Chief Justice Sir John and Lady Madden[24] and a relative by marriage of the late Mrs Ellis Rowan,[25] was noted in an Argus newspaper article on "Artists' Aliases".
[26] When in 1933 he exhibited with other students of Bell and Arnold Shore's school, Blamire Young commented that "Clive Stephen ... has a sound method of putting a design together.
"[27] During the same period, Stephen and his wife Dorothy, a painter, conducted life-classes that attracted such artists as Will Dyson, and others in the nascent modern movement in Melbourne.
After searching, let us say, on the surface of his material, by carving its external coat, he begins now to cut it, to excavate into it, to free from it some secret, without which sculpture is in danger of remaining at the bas-relief stage, and of being too elusive.
"[32]Stephen was also an ardent collector; as early as 1934 he acquired Head of a woman (1933),[33] painted in Bali by Ian Fairweather (likewise an artist influenced by the primitives), which he gifted to the National Gallery of Victoria in 1948.