Artist's Statement

Art is a Lie that Tells a Truth

All aspects of my environment, society, and personal life fuel my imagination. As an artist I want to communicate my ideas and emotions through formal visual means, literal associations, and poetic metaphor.

Working intuitively, I am fascinated by what happens accidentally. Adding one line impression to another, like riding a wave, I let myself flow with the movement. I do not visualize the complete image, nor am I aware of every line being made. An image unfolds because something inside me knows where I'm going. I play like a child as my lines glide and tangle and arrive at a point that my hand, eye, and mind know one another.

I see the creative process as the merging of abstraction and invention. For me, art is a lie that tells a truth.

A photograph is only a fraction of a moment in time from a fixed point of view. My art reaches beyond that — drawing on conscious and unconscious associations, smells, temperature, memory. I weave reflections of overlapping images: shifting ambiguities suspended in time and place, with no beginning or end. Teased by mystification, I fill the gaps between suggested cues and enter the worlds of art, advertising, and politics.

I consider myself a humanist observer of the social scene. Life's ironies and contradictions, fears, hopes, burdens and joys — I see them in everyday objects. Creating an image that satisfies me and moves a viewer to think, feel, and reflect is my reward.

I prefer the process art of block printmaking because it suits my personality. Each cut is an adventure into the unknown. The limitations of the medium force me to use an economy of line and expressive shapes. When I make a block print from a painting or photograph, I liken it to taking music written for an orchestra and transcribing it for a piano solo — I get the essence of the original with a new interpretation.

When I make a book, it is a compositional structure like a mural, novel, play, or motion picture — offering meaning through its sequence of words and images. This kind of book is not a catalog or family album; it is what is referred to as an artist's book. I want the viewer to look slowly and enter my space, rhythm, and mood, turning pages from cover to cover. The quality of the paper, type of binding, the character and style of the font, spacing of words, paragraphs, and sequence of images are as important as the literal content. Holding the book should be a unique aesthetic experience — kinetic, tactile, formal, and personal.

My egalitarian side led me to work with a commercial printer to produce limited signed editions of 500 or 1000 copies, reaching a wider audience at a reasonable price. Over twenty-five years I have produced eight books as publisher of Tortoise Press — creating the images, text, word associations, and design flow myself. It is my exhibit and my statement.

When I view a work of art, I see it on two levels: formal and literal. Formal is the design structure — forms, shapes, lines, tones, colors. When these elements are juxtaposed against one another, they generate a visual tension that affects me viscerally. I believe I get my sense of design from the structure of the human figure itself: variety, with the head and feet, and repetition, with the arms and hands. Literal is the content, mood, character, and feeling. When the two come together and reinforce each other, I feel I'm in the presence of something true. The person who says they don't know anything about art but knows what they like is, unknowingly, responding to exactly that.

Stan's Bio