Oil painter James Everett Stanley will deliver an artist lecture in continuation of the Chautauqua Visual Arts Lecture Series at 6:30 p.m. tonight in Hultquist Center.
Stanley continues the lecture series as a guest faculty member within CVA’s School of Art. Other faculty members who have delivered lectures this season include Susanna Coffey and Sean Glover.
The New England-based painter is an associate professor of painting at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and received his Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University.
Stanley has exhibited at numerous galleries including Sean Horton Presents, New York; Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York; Provincetown Arts Society, Provincetown; EXPO Chicago; and Art Basel Miami Beach, according to his artist biography. He has received fellowships from the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and his work is housed in the permanent collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem.
In CVA Artistic Director Erika Hess’ podcast, “I Like Your Work,” Stanley discussed his artistic background as a photographer and his desire to create moments more than document them.
In the podcast, Stanley said that the work he is making reflects the space he lives in, Cape Cod, and his background. Growing up with his mother, a lifelong New Englander, and his father, an immigrant, Stanley now investigates these two worlds through his art, while also playing with the malleability of memory, he said.
“Those two worlds colliding, when I’m looking at the history of the space in which I’m living in, it reflects a little of that history,” he said.
He said the theme of memory became more prevalent in his paintings as he developed his practice, and he became interested in exploring his personal history and his relationship to his surroundings through his sense of time and memory.
“That started to get into the work, and thinking about this place or this space reflecting some of my own personal history. Some works I’m in, but other ones, they’re these collaged images of figure and landscape if it’s boiled down to something simplistic,” he said.
Because his work focuses on how memory portrays or distorts life experiences, Stanley’s investigation through his art practice focuses on these ambiguous ways in which time is experienced or reflected on, according to the podcast.
Stanley uses the techniques of collage in the medium of oil painting to depict these fragmented memories and fragmented portions of time.
“If you look really quickly, it just looks like one scene, but if you take that longer look, you’ll realize it breaks down, and there’s multiple landscapes, etc. in there,” he told Hess.
