Ya no hay tiempo (There isn't time now), from Goya's Disaste

At nearly 9 by 11 feet, Goya's canvas isn't something you look at so much as stand inside — the scale alone puts the viewer at ground level with the condemned. Stan returned to it more than once: the arc dividing victims from aggressors, the light falling exactly where the eye needs to land, the crowd resolving into a handful of essential shapes. It's a painting built on structure as much as feeling.

Stan laid these curves directly over a reproduction of "The Third of May" — long, sweeping arcs crossing and recrossing through the crowd, the soldiers, the hillside. One arc, running from the upper left down to the lower right, does the most work: it's the line Goya used to divide the canvas itself, victims on one side, aggressors on the other. Us from them. Stan is looking at Goya from a compositional perspective as well as a literal one.

A quick color study in warm marker and pen, stripping the painting down to its value structure — the pale hillside and lit shirt against near-black sky and shadow, the crowd rendered as dense masses of brown and rust rather than individual figures. Stan wasn't copying Goya's palette so much as isolating it: where the light falls, where it doesn't, and how little color it actually takes to hold a composition together.

A dense pen study reducing the painting to pure value — no color at all, just uniform hatching pushed darker or lighter depending on where Goya wanted the eye to land. The figures barely register as figures; they're negative space, carved out of the dark by what's left unmarked. Stripped this far down, the painting reads almost like a woodcut before it's even carved — light and dark doing the same job Stan would later ask them to do in his own prints.

Here Stan traces the figures down to their essential outlines — hard, simplified silhouettes with dotted lines marking the rhythms and directions moving between them. The kneeling man's raised arms form a clean, unmistakable shape that also separates him from the people huddled at the lower left. The soldiers fold into a single angular mass, its edge pushing across the dividing arc into the victims' space — just as the resisting figures on the other side reach back into the soldiers'. The line between them isn't as fixed as it first appears.

A grid of dashed verticals and horizontals laid over the composition, mapping the hidden architecture beneath the chaos — where a raised arm lines up with a distant rooftop, where a shoulder falls exactly on a horizontal drawn from the crowd behind it. Underneath the arcs and the drama, Stan found a quieter structure holding everything in place: a scaffold of straight lines the eye never consciously sees.

Linoleum Cut, 1997 · [Size: TBD]

Everything the studies uncovered converges here — the raised arms, the dividing arc now a jagged hillside, the crowd folded into a single dense mass on the right. Stan also made a deliberate shift: where Goya's canvas spreads the confrontation out horizontally, across a wide stage, Stan turned it vertical — stacking the sky, the skyline, and the crowd into a single column. The effect isn't the same. Instead of witnessing a standoff across open ground, the eye feels something bearing down. A study in every sense, but a finished print — Goya's painting carved back into Stan's own hand, and reimagined in the process.