Tom Stanley

Monday, November 9, 2009

Tom Stanley at the computer at if ART Gallery

Below, see Tom Stanley being busy on the computer at if ART Gallery, Nov. 5, 2009.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

DISCOVERING WHAT'S NEXT – essay by Wim Roefs

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.”

Sunday, November 30, 2008

if ARTwalk: Salon I & II: December 11- 24, 2008

For exhibition installation images, click here.

THE SALON I & II

Dec. 11 – 24, 2008

an exhibition at two Columbia, SC, locations:

Gallery 80808/Vista Studios

808 Lady Street

if ART Gallery

1223 Lincoln Street

Reception and ifART Walk: Thursday, Dec. 11, 5 – 10 p.m.

at and between both locations

Opening Hours:

Weekdays, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.

Saturday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Sunday, 1 – 5 p.m.

& by appointment

Open Christmas Eve until 7 p.m.

For more information, contact Wim Roefs at if ART:

(803) 255-0068/ (803) 238-2351 – if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com

For its December 2008 exhibition, if ART Gallery presents The Salon I & II, an exhibition at two Columbia, SC, locations: if ART Gallery and Gallery 80808/Vista Studios. On Thursday, December 11, 2008, 5 – 10 p.m., if ART will hold opening receptions at both locations. The ifART Walk will be on Lady and Lincoln Streets, between both locations, which are around the corner from each other.

The exhibitions will present art by if ART Gallery artists, installed salon-style at both Gallery 80808 and if ART. Artists in the exhibitions include two new additions to if ART Gallery, Columbia ceramic artist Renee Rouillier and the prominent African-American collage and mixed-media artist Sam Middleton, an 81-year-old expatriate who has lived in the Netherlands since the early 1960s.

Other artists in the exhibition include Karel Appel, Aaron Baldwin, Jeri Burdick, Carl Blair, Lynn Chadwick, Steven Chapp, Stephen Chesley, Corneille, Jeff Donovan, Jacques Doucet, Phil Garrett, Herbert Gentry, Tonya Gregg, Jerry Harris, Bill Jackson, Sjaak Korsten, Peter Lenzo, Sam Middleton, Eric Miller, Dorothy Netherland, Marcelo Novo, Matt Overend, Anna Redwine, Paul Reed, Edward Rice, Silvia Rudolf, Kees Salentijn, Laura Spong, Tom Stanley, Christine Tedesco, Brown Thornton, Leo Twiggs, Bram van Velde, Katie Walker, Mike Williams, David Yaghjian, Paul Yanko and Don Zurlo.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Works of Art: Tom Stanley

All works by Tom Stanley available through if ART Gallery. (803) 238-2351 / wroefs@sc.rr.com.

Drawings Across the Seas #9, 2016,
acrylic on 300# Arches, 22 x 30 in., $2,500

Untitled, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 60 in., $5,000

The Neighborhood, 2005-06,
acrylic on panel, 33 x 39 in., $1,800

Red, White and Black #2, 2010, acrylic on canvas,
48 x 68 in., $5,000

Monday, September 15, 2008

Biography: Tom Stanley

Rock Hill, S.C., artist Tom Stanley (b. 1950), a native of Fort Hood, Tex., who grew up in Concord, N.C., is among South Carolina’s premier artists, art teachers, curators and arts administrators. He retired in 2017 as the chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Winthrop University, where he also for many years was the director of the department’s art galleries.

Stanley will have a solo exhibition at Halsey Institute for Contemporary Art at South Carolina’s College of Charleston in May 2017. Since 1973, he has shown in some three dozen solo and two-person exhibitions, including in 2016 at the Casa-Museu Abel Salazar in Porto, Portugal, as well in some 70 group exhibitions. He was included in the 2004 S.C. Triennialat the South Carolina State Museum; Triennial Revisitedin 2011 and the 701 CCA South Carolina Biennial 2013 at701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, S.C.; and the S.C. State Museum’s 2012’s Abstract Art in South Carolina, 1949–2012.

Stanley has exhibited throughout the Southeastern Unites States and elsewhere in the country and in Germany, Switzerland, France and Portugal. The exhibitions include those at institutions such as Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco; the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts; the National Art Club in New York; La Galerie du Marchéin Lausanne, Switzerland; Musée de la Halle Saint Pierre in Paris, France; the Columbia Museum of Art, University of South Carolina’s McKissick Museum, the Sumter County Gallery of Art and Myrtle Beach’s Burroughs and Chapin Museum, all in South Carolina; the McColl Center for Visual Arts in Charlotte, the Hickory Museum of Art, Greensboro’s Weatherspoon Art Museum and Greenhill Center for North Carolina Art, Raleigh’s Artspace and Winston-Salem’s Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, all in North Carolina; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond; and the Montgomery Museum of Art in Alabama.

Stanley has created some 10 public artworks in North and South Carolina and Arkansas, many of them with Winthrop colleague Shaun Cassidy. His work is in the many private, corporate and public collections, including the S.C. State Art Collection and those of the S.C. State Museum; Jean de Matini et Geneviève Roulin and the Offices of the Collection de l’Art Brut, both in Lausanne; Duke University; and the N.C. Center for the Advancement of Teaching in Asheville. He has curated or organized more than 40 exhibitions. In 1980, Stanley received an MFA in painting and MA in applied art history from the University of South Carolina; he received a BA in studio art in 1972 from Belmont Abbey/Sacred Heart Colleges in Belmont, N.C.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Essay: Tom Stanley

TOM STANLEY – The Neighborhood

By Wim Roefs

“I think of my images as free floating narratives,” Tom Stanley wrote in 1995. That’s still true for his work, including his most recent series, “The Neighborhood.” In his narratives, Stanley seems to be on the move. He’s “Floating,” “En Route to Hamlet” or going “Across the River,” as his series’ titles indicate.

As he travels, physically but more so in his mind, Stanley explores human activity. His tableaus are composites of scenes, structures or objects he has seen and symbols, letters and words linked to people and experiences. “The idea, I supposes, is the journey,” Stanley said in 1998.

In “The Neighborhood,” the eye strolls from a row of houses or larger structures to a church or a power-line tower. Stanley places the elements next to or on top of each other, creating a delicate construction of clues to his views about society. He often exhibits several paintings in a horizontal row, providing complimentary angles on a subject.

His neighborhoods, Stanley says, represent “built environments that are forms of human expression.” Symbols for oil and electricity are monuments of survival. There are large wheels, often with buildings or other structures balancing on them. There’s a bucket, a spigot or a chemist’s bottle.

Stanley’s recycling of images in different series suggests that as he emphasizes specific concerns, he’s developing a broader, integrated view of “human expression.” Many elements of “The Neighborhood” already appeared in “Floating,” then placed on large ships, combined with symbols of oil and warfare but also of nature and the circus. Nature, especially trees, as well as boats, wheels and imposing architectural structures featured in “Across the River.” There, Stanley also explored family history – more specifically, the mysterious 1920 drowning death of his grandfather in the Mississippi River at New Orleans.

Many of the elements in the work go back to the early 1990s. Inspired by self-taught artists he worked with as a curator, Stanley began to mine his own experience, memories and environment – “my myth,” as he has called it – in a free-associative, even stream-of-conscious manner. This resulted in colorful, crowded-but-balanced tableaus populated by dozens of small, roughly rendered objects, shapes, structures, symbols and big and small Pacman-like profiles.

From the mid-1990s, Stanley gave the individual elements in his busy work their own space, isolating them in small, square paintings. He installed dozens of them in flowing, lively narratives called “En Route to Hamlet.” The shape and size of the installation would change according to the space Stanley exhibited in.

Aesthetically, too, the work had a distinctly un-academic, informal feel. In addition to self-taught artists, the paintings related to Art Brut and the likes of Jean Dubuffet and Paul Klee. But already with “Hamlet,” a formalization of Stanley’s work set in. The Hamlet series maintained an informal painting and drawing style, but the isolation of individual elements in sparse paintings gave them a formal touch.

The late-1990s’ “Profile En Route to Hamlet” series was busy again but clearly and deliberately organized around a large head in profile. And in the “Profiles” series of 2003, the large head shared a rather barren environment with only a few geometric forms. The change since the mid-1990s from rather colorful to a muted, sometimes even darkish palette also increased the work’s formal quality.

The series “Across the River” of 2002 – 03 seems pivotal. In it, the mechanical, hard-edged drawing style, the strict, calculated compositions and the stylized shapes that define Stanley’s current work begin to dominate. And while the personal remained important, the human figure through the profile disappeared.

In his last few series, Stanley has intensified the hard-edged, geometric narrative form. He has replaced muted colors with stark black-and-white compositions, sometimes with a touch of red. The human figure is gone even as humanity remains Stanley’s focus. Stanley’s autobiographical presence of the early 1990s has made way for the artist as analyst, as distant observer. “Tom in the world” has become “the world Tom lives in.”