Tom Stanley: Discovering
What’s Next
By Wim Roefs
Tom Stanley’s habitual
recycling of imagery has given his rather wide-ranging body of work of the past
two decades considerable consistency, making the paintings easily identifiable.
Stanley (b. 1950) builds on visual elements of previous work to create new
free-floating narratives. In the seven paintings in the current exhibition, the
Rock Hill, S.C., artist is taking this process a step further. While he’s not
exactly taking inventory of his visual language so far, the Winthrop University
art department chair is presenting somewhat of a glossary.
“In
the past I have done bodies of work that I think are about my grandfather who I
never met, or about New Orleans and floating on the river, or listening to Rahsaan
Roland Kirk or Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, or about my mother's boarding
house on Brumley Street in Concord, N.C., or traveling en route to Hamlet - an imaginary place of improvisation and
creativity. Here I am just painting. If those elements of memory enter the
narrative of my hand and mind, fine, but if so, it is not totally a conscious
decision.”
“It is deliberate only to the extent that these
images, or related images, are what I know. I do try to approach them in new
ways so they have the opportunity to say something new on the surface of the
canvas.” But what are the paintings about? “Lord have mercy. It is
about discovering what is next.”
The
work is about Stanley doing the work, he says, and his personal history is
reflected on the canvas. “It’s magical to the extent that I can work. Working
is magical.”
As
in much of Stanley’s work, the human presence is in his hard-edge or shaky shapes
and objects rather than through the actual presence of human forms. The latter
were prominent in his earlier work as well as in his more recent Big Lots series, but they are absent in many
of his paintings, which often rely on mechanical drawing. “I was a mechanical
drawing nerd,” he says of his youth, working in his dad’s machine shop, filing
blueprints. “I also think that I am producing images that are man-made, or
human-made.” His interest in Edmund Lewandowski, a Precisionist painter and former Winthrop art department head, has
to do with Lewandowski’s interest in the humanity of making things.
“If
anything, I continue to file blueprints, but I am old enough now to not rely on
the myth that I had created in my free-floating narratives of memory and the
past. I am trying to rely on my ability to work. Time is a very precious
commodity. When I can work, I am also paying homage to time, to that time, to my
time. It is about being here now. It is about what I have, the images or
glossary, to make my paintings.”
