WILSON, N.C. —September 28, 2017 — October is shaping up to be a great month for art lovers, especially those with an interest in figurative painting. Barton College celebrates new Artist-in-Residence James Everett Stanley with a series of public events featuring the award-winning painter. His new exhibition, “Lands Seen and Unseen,” opens at the Barton Art Galleries on Thursday, Oct. 12, and runs through Tuesday, Nov 21.
On Thursday, Oct. 12, the Barton College Friends of Visual Arts will host its annual FOVA Fall Lecture and Dinner. A wine and cheese reception with the artist will begin in the Barton Art Galleries at 5 p.m., followed by Stanley’s lecture at 6 p.m. Guests are then invited to the Kennedy Family Theatre for dinner at 7 p.m. The reception and lecture are open to the community free of charge, but reservations are required for the dinner event. Tickets for the dinner are $25 for FOVA members and $35 nonmembers, and reservations and payments must be received by Friday, Oct. 6.
While serving as artist-in-residence at Barton, Stanley also plans to engage the Barton First-Year Seminar students in a project related to identity and culture. And, he will provide two Saturday workshops for the community on Saturday, Oct. 21, and 28. The cost for each workshop is $15.00 for FOVA members and $25.00 for nonmembers.
For more information about these events or to make reservations for the Oct. 12 dinner or the Oct. 21 or Oct. 28 Saturday workshops, contact Maureen O’Neill, director of exhibitions and educational programming at Barton Art Galleries, at 252-399-6476 or moneill@barton.edu.
Saturday Workshops in October —
On Saturday, Oct. 21, Stanley will focus on “Faces: A Portrait Workshop,” which will run from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m., with a lunch break. (Participants should bring a bagged lunch for the break.) Stanley refers to David Hockney’s quotation about faces, which reads, “Faces are the most interesting things we see…and the most interesting aspect of other people – the point where we go inside them – is the face. It tells all.” He continues, adding his own thoughts, “Portraiture is the great abiding tradition of painting. In mastering the direct human gaze, an artist is able to distill and illuminate what might otherwise remain unarticulated: the desires, disappointments, and mysteries of the human condition. In this workshop we will complete self-portraits, exploring the effects of light, color, composition and mark making as we consider, in a brief lecture, historical and contemporary portrait work of painters like Manet, Lucian Freud, Michael Borremans, Kaye Donachie and others.” Some painting experience is highly beneficial, though not required.
On Saturday, Oct. 28, the workshop focus will be “Drawing From The Figure,” which will run from 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. Stanley notes, “One of the best ways to develop or reinforce drawing skills is through life drawing. In this one day workshop, we will do some quick drawing exercises that aim to develop an eye that can more critically see the properties of line, tone, proportions, and composition.”
About the Artist-in-Residence —
Stanley is a painter based in the Northeast. His work has been shown widely, including solo and group exhibitions at Freight & Volume Gallery in New York, Kinkead Contemporary in Los Angeles, Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago, Frederic Snitzer Gallery Miami, and Mark Selwyn in Los Angeles. His 2011 exhibition “Let It Burn” was cited by the Huffington Post as one of the Top 10 Painting Shows in the United States.
Stanley received his Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from Columbia University and also is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He was awarded a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program fellowship, and he also received a fellowship from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he now serves as program coordinator. Stanley also serves as a faculty member of The Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University. He makes his home on Cape Cod.
Expressing thoughts about his painting practice, Stanley shared, “In an explosive age of new media that I find exciting and attractive, my own practice continues: I paint people and landscapes, birds and scavengers. I work with oil and watercolor, seeking to capture the qualities of energetic stillness that for me, only a direct address of the figure can achieve. I view each of my paintings as an empathic object — a months-long communion with my subject, whose silence compels me to imagine and invent narratives, often of disappointment and longing. Most recently, I’ve been using collaged reference images to break up the conventional pictorial space in my previous work. These paintings are intended to be elemental studies of what abides and remains, the boiled down remnants of the human experience. I hope they evoke enduring tales of mortality. It’s the oldest story of our lives: we’re born, we die. I want my paintings to succeed as individual, particular variations on this binding structure of the human life.”
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