14/11: Hangin' in the Studio with Stan
Category: Interviews
Posted by: viol8ion
Hangin' in the Studio with Stan - An Interview with Pastel Painter Stan Sperlak
By Liz Nicklus, 2003
Stan Sperlak was born in Denver Colorado in 1960. He was raised in Hawaii, New York and Minnesota before he wopund up in Cape May Courthouse were he lives today.
He asked me to make sure I mentioned his sons, Michael and Joseph. His pastels are legendary throughout the region. He has just completed a very successful show at the Riverfront Renaissance Center for the Arts in Millville, NJ.
Liz: You look like somebody who's from Denver (looking at Stan's bio)
Stan: Somewhere along the line I realized maybe why I'm a little bit the way I am, and it dawned on me that I was born a mile high. You know, Mile High Stadium? OK, so I was born a mile high and you know, maybe I've been coming down ever since, I don't know, or leveling off, but I've never been back to Denver since I was 18 months old, and I have some relatives out there, and I do want to go. And now that these past few years I've met a lot of artists from around the country, with the Wings and Water, and the Plein Air Festival, and they've invited us out to Colorado, so I know I'll go back out there.
Liz: That's cool.
Stan: But it's funny, you know, you're from Cape May County, in most everybody's mind. You're from New Jersey, but you're not, you were born somewhere else. It probably doesn't matter where you were born.
Liz: Few people you meet from around here are from around here.
Stan: Well, in Cape May County though, you do meet…there's quite a few…
Liz: Actually, in Millville you do, too. So how do you work?
Stan: I guess painters all paint different ways. I tend to paint in extremely long bursts, and then I stop for a month or two. Then I'll paint for two or three months, and then I'll stop for a month or two. And so, back in late June, early July, I started painting. You've got shows coming up, obviously you want to have work for shows, you want new work, and because I paint outside it was really nice for me to be always looking for new subject matter. I don't have to flip through photos and try to find things that way. I just go "today I'm going north" and I stop somewhere and I start painting. Or I go south, or I look at the sky and just see what potential it has. Going back to when you first came inm you saw that painting over there...
Liz: It reminds me of the triptych you had in your show at the RRCA.
Stan: It's the root for that. That was the field painting I did there. I'd been painting really hard for several weeks, and I really felt I was done. It was time to start framing things for a show, and to just say, "That's enough, and I've got enough work together. Let's just sort through, which ones are worth framing and which ones need to be put aside". And I dropped my sons off at high school one morning, and I saw this steam rising off these piles of in this patch of woods. And I wanted to go back there and see what it was. I could see it from the street, there were trees in the way. So I walked through there And as I got back, the smell of what's called tree blood, dead bark, dead cedar, very fresh smell. They just chopped them up.
So I was just terribly affected by it, in that, I'm thinking, "Oh my god, it smells like cedar, like a hope chest, but it's not a pretty smell. It's the result of a thousand cedar trees being ground up, and 500 oak trees being ground up". And these huge mountains were there, and they were steaming. It had just been done within the last week, so it was very fresh. It really bothered me, so I looked, and I walked around, and I realized this was going to be a golf course. I kept walking around and walking around, started following what I knew were the fairways. I'd not been in that patch of woods before, but I know the area. And it looked like everything I'd ever seen, but to me it was crying, screaming "what's happening to us, what's happening to us?".
There were no bunnies, no birds, nothing. Couple of vultures flying in the sky, right? I put them in the triptych, too. I didn't immediately think about it as something to paint, because it wasn't necessarily natural, you know, a construction site. But I had recently been painting Shellpile, in Bivalve, in Fortesque. And you know, as you mature as an artist, you go from painting what automatically is pretty, what you see right away "Well, that's a nice composition" and you'll work on that, to then maybe finding things that aren't that pretty, or that are more of a challenge, that you paint because you like them or you paint because they mean something to you. In the last couple of years, that's the way a lot of my paintings have gone. The show I had at the Mad Batter was titled "Places I Go". Well I basically I looked on a map and figured all the places I used to hide when I was in high school. (Laughing) When I wanted to get out of school early, you know, without a pass, these are the places I would go.
So anyway, I went to this place, I walked around, I was tired. I was painting all morning, it was the middle of the day, it was hot, probably not the best time to just decide to paint in the middle of a forest that's been torn down. I cam home, I looked at the photos that I had on my camera (I had shot some pictures while I was down there), I said, "you know what? I have to go back there, I have to. There's something going on there that I have to go back and maybe, at least, record. I'm not to save it, I'm not going to change it, but maybe I can record it." So I went back, and I did that painting there, a field study. I couldn't get enough emotion, that I thought was saying… it started to look pretty.
Liz: It does look pretty.
Stan: Right. And I said, you know, that's not necessarily what I should be doing. Then I thought, well, should I try to make it look ugly? What should I do? I don't know. I started leaving out information, I didn't put all the stumps in, I only put in one, and I said " there's something that I'm missing". So I took some more pictures, then all of a sudden, I turned the camera sideways, and took a vertical sort of picture. Then I realized, this could be an interesting of arrangement for a series of paintings. Well I came back, and worked like a madman, I did the drawings. I brought these drawings out to show you. I laid it out, and then I painted, I swear I painted it right through the night. Just kept painting, painting, painting, painting. Got up in the morning, after 4 or 5 hours sleep, started painting again, and really got it all done, about a week before the show. I was curious about how I was going to present it. As I did the foreground in the actual finished painting, it's very smooth, it's very open. One of the people who came to the show said, you know, you've really got something going in your paintings, you can feel the sand. In that other painting over there, you can feel the gravel. I'm like "he's a smart guy, he sees that's gravel". It's not only that it's orange, or dirt, but it really was, it was gravel. Because they had ripped off all the loam and the rich soil. So I can't say that all of sudden I'm a conservationist, but I love the county, I love the land, I love the whole area.
Liz: Whatever it is you were going for, you hit it in that triptych, though.
Stan: So I wanted it to be a little bit more like, OK, some people are going to see it and say, that's a beautiful painting. Some people are going to look at it and say, why are those trees standing there all by themselves? And someone else will look at it and say, hey, it looks like a golf course is going in. There were all those reactions the night of the opening. But what I said was, to myself, maybe it can be interpreted this way. People think that's beautiful, but in reality, it's horrible. It was just a very horrible thing that happened there. But as an artist, I worked with it, and thought maybe there was something that I could do to maybe restore some dignity to those trees. To maybe record that this is what happened there, before the grass goes in, before the golfers are hanging out. So I fooled with it a little bit, and, as you look through the triptych, you'll see on the right hand side, coming out of the woods, without trunks on them, are two globular shapes. And what they are is, they're man's trees. That's what's taking over. Round trees, shaped, pretty, organized. What we think, or people tend to think, are pretty.
As a contractor, my other field, I can't get people to buy native trees, because they're ugly, they're crooked, they're not straight. They don't get those pink flowers. On the other hand, people buy art. They buy paintings that I do of the wild areas, of crooked trees. So in there yard they want things too organized, hanging on their walls, they want the wild areas. So, it's funny. It makes me think a lot about what I'm going to say over the next few years as I paint, how I look at it. Obviously all artists throughout history have recorded the current events of their time, whether by accident or by design. I started looking back over my work. Luckily, enough of Cape May County is preserved, it won't be changed. But I know 12 years ago I bought my first painting. It was actually rather expensive. I was 26, 27 years old, and I went out and bought a painting for $850.00. I think that's like a $2000 or $3000 painting in today's prices. I bought this painting because it was exactly what I saw happening in Cape May County. There were farms all over the place. Old farmhouse, big empty lot. Every third or fourth one now had a sign on it, "DEVELOPMENT". You know, it's a classic argument, you see it in all the cartoons, ans the rabbits get chased out. But it was really happening here. We had just bought a house in Cape May Courthouse, and right across the street from us was a farm, and a field. Beautiful, old cabbages out there, 75-year-old farmer, no tractor, just a little roto-tiller. Boom, they put up a sign there "Soon to be Domino's Pizza". It bothered me, so I said "that painting means a lot to me" and I bought it. But I kept looking at that painting, and kept looking at it, kept thinking about how I paint, what I do. I think that painting cued me in to the idea that maybe, maybe being more involved in the arts. Maybe recording , painting things of this county. Like really finding the beauty. You know some of the statements that I say for the shows, I say that I try to record this for others to see.
Liz Right
Stan: And it is true because, people will come up to a painting I did when I kind of juice them up with some color just because the nature of pastels and just maybe I'm all vibrant or maybe I take a risk or two with it and they say "wow" and really, they like it. And you ask what they and they say, " I love the marshes and such' and you realize that maybe you're doing your work. Maybe that's exactly what you should be doing is making people realize 'that's just that stupid little farm field right up the street." "It is?" "That's the way I see it, I think a lot of other people see it that way". And I think that over time people realize that Cape May County, Cumberland County, the whole area, it's just glorious out here, it's gorgeous.
Liz: In a different respect, that's what the people in the Glasstown Nine have been doing. We're painting old dingy places that are getting knocked down because of all the new upscale stuff that is coming. I mean Carl has at least 3 paintings now of place that the next day they were torn down and now they are gone. He's got the only paintings that people have done of them, an old slaughterhouse, a couple of factories, and we're like "oh my god, it's gone."
Stan: Right, and Pat Witt was telling me about Shellpile. She said I am having a show next year, with all my paintings from the 60's and 70's of Shellpile, and none of that stuff is there anymore. And again the same thing is going on in cape may county, down there by the cape may canal. Lovely the township passed an ordinance they can't build any more condos. But they would put them right where the docks were, and then they would complain about the smell of the docks, and then the docks would close and then they would build more condos. I would say, if one of my voices as an artist is that I really think that we need to pay attention to these people who say that we need to save open spaces or that we need to at least slow down this sprawl; somebody has to do it sooner or later.
And, uh, the funny thing is sometimes ill put on the total other hat, "okay, we want to preserve farm fields", But always in these conversations with the green folks I say, you ought to have this conversation with the Indians and native American that were here 200 years ago and see how they feel about your farm fields.
Both: Laughing…
It's that not in my back yard, people build a house on a side street and they are the only house on that street and they don't like the neighbors that come, and then the 2 of them don't like the next neighbors that come, and somewhere along the line…
Liz: One thing I would like to talk about is your method, how do you work? You do a lot of plein-air. Do you go out and do the charcoal sketches first?
Stan: No. Usually I just go out and paint as if I am just shooting pictures just paint tiny studies. Sometimes I'll spend an hour or two in a little study because I have to. I'll do the studies and then I'll decide how big I want to make it as a studio painting. So I'll stick the study onto the wall, and I'll look at some photographs of it and I'll start to draw with charcoal on a sheet of paper that is about the size I would use for the painting. Then I can work out all the problems. But most of my paintings derive from drawings and plein-air. Even if I am just to work from a photograph, which I do, it's a photograph of which I actually painted before. I won't take a photograph of something and then never have actually have worked there artistically, because I won't feel connected.
That what I say to people that here and they want me to teach them a little bit about painting or drawing, and I think that is one of the first things I tell them; "you have to be willing to say well that didn't work, put it aside".
Liz: something are just not meant to be, put it down and move along.
Stan: Exactly, Sometimes I think people are not willing to do that, they feel they gotta keep working on it. That bottom cabinet over there is full of half starts.
Liz: What is this, copper?
Stan: yes
I paint on paper a lot, but paper buckles, paper stretches, paper hangs, paper does all the weird things is does. Paper's not forever. Some of the artists in the 1500s actually painted on copper.
Liz: Why copper?
Stan: because it lasts forever. It is permanent; it has a nice rigid support. There is a certain glow that comes from it, an apparent glow. I haven't been able to figure out the exact science needed to make it work for me yet. So when I paint on it I don't exactly know what's going to happen.
This is gesso board, this is Masonite, and then I put a little gesso on it with a little bit of pumice, burnt umber… um, I work a lot on sanded papers.
Lately I've been working on a paper called Wallace Sandpaper.
Liz" Where do you get that, at the artists supply store?
Stan: Yes, it is really easy. It is really the highest quality pastel paper that's available now. But once you paint on this you're committed.
Liz: You can't get rid of it.
Stan: Right. And recently I've been reading a book by Richard Ching(sp?) and it's funny… all the things that I was taught are somewhat different from the way he's teaching. He's saying that if you put a mark down, it had better be the mark that you want. You had better be happy with it; you shouldn't be trying to correct it. He goes, why bother putting it down in the first place, because if you're capable of putting a mark down you should be capable of putting the right mark down, and another mark next to it, and another one next to that. And build it, sort of like a puzzle, jigsaw paintings; a lot of artists work that way. There's not as many puzzle painters as there are layer painters, painter that do it all in layers. Which is the way I am. But it made me think that for clarity especially with pastels and sandpaper, if you really concentrate where you need it, and you use a modest amount of paint instead of a lot more. And if its too many layers you are just burying things, hiding things, mixing things.
What I am saying is with this paper you better be really ready to make your mark where you want it, or you just start chasing lines. You know how Pat Witt says there are the 'mud painters' that just keep mixing colors.
Liz: You said the show that you had in Millville was one of the only shows that you actually did the work for that show.
Stan: Right.
Liz: What are you working on now? Do you have another show coming up?
Stan: During the course of the Millville show I was able to put some of my paintings into juries for other shows for next year. What am I doing next? I am teaching for the University of Maryland in Ocean City. They have a week long art program that they bring in different instructors for. And there was a really nice reference from a fellow artist that said, "this guy does pastels." They called me up; I am going to go… I do like to teach, but there are still so many things I want to work out on my own before I go and teach too much. That is why I enjoy teaching people that are just starting out. I feel like I can cut them through so much of that learning curve… and everybody should experiment, they need to tie their own shoes, they need to figure out what they are doing, but… there are so many things you can do to cut corners, and a lot of it is material, and a lot of it is time. I take my art really seriously; I give it the time that it needs. I am lucky that I have this career that enables me to have free time. I am able to say that I am going to be painting for the next 3 or 4 days.
I realized that I haven't drawn from the figure in a long time, maybe as much as 2 years. I have this itch, and the Cape May County Art League had classes back in the winter which I didn't take for some reason, so standing around in the studio I did what so many artists have done, I took my shirt off and got a mirror and stuck it up on the wall and I started drawing from myself. That was really fun, and that is what whetted my appetite for going back and trying to work with figures. I have a model lined up for this fall and winter that I will work with. There has to be a progression in what I do. I love the landscapes; I always want to paint landscapes. But this show in Millville I left people out of the paintings on purpose. There are no people in any of the paintings.
A big influence on me, Ginny Tabor, wanted to paint, but she wanted to have a reason to be saying exactly what she was saying in her paintings. And I started thinking about that, and the people that are in paintings, and what makes them alive.
Are there any other books that you would recommend?
I recently met Bill Creevy; Pat Witt brought him in. I know when I took a book out of the library 10 or 12 years ago to learn about pastel painting, and this guy's work was talking to me. And it's funny, 12 years later, there he is standing in Pat Witt's driveway squirting water on pastel paintings, brushing them around and doing the same kind of thing that I like to do. Ands we had a good conversation. We talked about eventually trying to build pastels so that they do not have to be put behind glass. For whatever reason we want to do that, and I am not even sure why that is; it seems that people that do pastels with a lot of textures want to ditch the glass. Maybe we are having envy of oil paintings. It is frustrating as an artist that also frames a lot of his own work to have to be dealing with glass and mattes.
Liz: You don't put a fixative on yours, do you?
Stan: I do a lot with fixatives early on in the painting, with textures. But the last couple layers are nothing but pure pigment. Very, very soft pastel on a very rough surface. So it hangs on the paper. When you move around and you look at a pastel, and I think this is what gets people excited about pastels, they're not sure why they are attracted to it other than they like the subject matter, but it's the fact that it is just a bunch of dust or minerals hanging there on a piece of paper. It doesn't have a liquid look to it, and it doesn't have a stained look like watercolors. If you do liquefy them (apply fixative) you kind of kill them. So if you just leave them behind glass, you can enjoy the way the light hits all the edges.
Liz: Where can your work be seen?
Stan: I always have work in my studio. People always visit me here. If they are not careful, I sometimes tell them too much. I kind of go dry in the throat if someone wants to talk about art.
Ocean Galleries in Stone Harbor and Avalon, they have been very supportive of me.
This year I plan on traveling a lot.
Like poets and writers, you are not going to do anything new unless you take a chance, do something absurd,
Liz: Talk about your workshop at ACC
Stan: What I'll do at ACC, they asked me to teach at their Saturday workshop… what I'll do is ask the put their pastels away for a little while, because the first thing we are going to do is draw. Hopefully by the end of the class there will be enough information given out that they will learn to use the pastels in moderation.
Some of the things that we covered here, knowing when things are just not right. You just park them. And knowing to have a reason. Doug Dawson said to me in a class I had with him years ago, he said, "if you are going to be painting something, there ought to be a good reason you are painting it." You have to have that thought pass through your head at least once, "why am I painting this? What is the one thing that I am trying to convey here?"
If it is a bowl and the way the light hits the edge, and that means enough to you, fine. If it is a field and it is a hot day, get it in there. Somehow get it in there. But that's what's going to be needed when the viewer looks at it. I read this about Albert Handell, he is a great pastel painter. Someone asked him what he looks for in a painting. He goes "that one little thing." And it may just be a fleck of yellow on a branch somewhere, but it is something that makes it alive, that makes it unique. There has to be some sort of spark in it, something that bites. That's important, to have your own artistic vision in these pieces.
Liz: I heard this quote, unfortunately I do not know the artist's name, but I had to write down this quote, it was so good. She said, "Art is something from inside that is pulled into the physical world." I thought that was so profound.
Stan: There are a couple of things that really resonate with me. One is the creation of art that you make up there, on your paper, is like a record. I recorded that event right there, and you look at it and play it. That creativity that you are doing, it's not about making it right, it's not about making it these colors… it's about your eyes, your hand, your medium and your subject matter, and the interaction that happens for that hour. It's that connection of those parts, how your hand, eye materials create something. When you put yourself in the right place, in a decent frame of mind and just paint, I think that you succeed.
By Liz Nicklus, 2003
Stan Sperlak was born in Denver Colorado in 1960. He was raised in Hawaii, New York and Minnesota before he wopund up in Cape May Courthouse were he lives today.
He asked me to make sure I mentioned his sons, Michael and Joseph. His pastels are legendary throughout the region. He has just completed a very successful show at the Riverfront Renaissance Center for the Arts in Millville, NJ.
Liz: You look like somebody who's from Denver (looking at Stan's bio)
Stan: Somewhere along the line I realized maybe why I'm a little bit the way I am, and it dawned on me that I was born a mile high. You know, Mile High Stadium? OK, so I was born a mile high and you know, maybe I've been coming down ever since, I don't know, or leveling off, but I've never been back to Denver since I was 18 months old, and I have some relatives out there, and I do want to go. And now that these past few years I've met a lot of artists from around the country, with the Wings and Water, and the Plein Air Festival, and they've invited us out to Colorado, so I know I'll go back out there.
Liz: That's cool.
Stan: But it's funny, you know, you're from Cape May County, in most everybody's mind. You're from New Jersey, but you're not, you were born somewhere else. It probably doesn't matter where you were born.
Liz: Few people you meet from around here are from around here.
Stan: Well, in Cape May County though, you do meet…there's quite a few…
Liz: Actually, in Millville you do, too. So how do you work?
Stan: I guess painters all paint different ways. I tend to paint in extremely long bursts, and then I stop for a month or two. Then I'll paint for two or three months, and then I'll stop for a month or two. And so, back in late June, early July, I started painting. You've got shows coming up, obviously you want to have work for shows, you want new work, and because I paint outside it was really nice for me to be always looking for new subject matter. I don't have to flip through photos and try to find things that way. I just go "today I'm going north" and I stop somewhere and I start painting. Or I go south, or I look at the sky and just see what potential it has. Going back to when you first came inm you saw that painting over there...
Liz: It reminds me of the triptych you had in your show at the RRCA.
Stan: It's the root for that. That was the field painting I did there. I'd been painting really hard for several weeks, and I really felt I was done. It was time to start framing things for a show, and to just say, "That's enough, and I've got enough work together. Let's just sort through, which ones are worth framing and which ones need to be put aside". And I dropped my sons off at high school one morning, and I saw this steam rising off these piles of in this patch of woods. And I wanted to go back there and see what it was. I could see it from the street, there were trees in the way. So I walked through there And as I got back, the smell of what's called tree blood, dead bark, dead cedar, very fresh smell. They just chopped them up.
So I was just terribly affected by it, in that, I'm thinking, "Oh my god, it smells like cedar, like a hope chest, but it's not a pretty smell. It's the result of a thousand cedar trees being ground up, and 500 oak trees being ground up". And these huge mountains were there, and they were steaming. It had just been done within the last week, so it was very fresh. It really bothered me, so I looked, and I walked around, and I realized this was going to be a golf course. I kept walking around and walking around, started following what I knew were the fairways. I'd not been in that patch of woods before, but I know the area. And it looked like everything I'd ever seen, but to me it was crying, screaming "what's happening to us, what's happening to us?".
There were no bunnies, no birds, nothing. Couple of vultures flying in the sky, right? I put them in the triptych, too. I didn't immediately think about it as something to paint, because it wasn't necessarily natural, you know, a construction site. But I had recently been painting Shellpile, in Bivalve, in Fortesque. And you know, as you mature as an artist, you go from painting what automatically is pretty, what you see right away "Well, that's a nice composition" and you'll work on that, to then maybe finding things that aren't that pretty, or that are more of a challenge, that you paint because you like them or you paint because they mean something to you. In the last couple of years, that's the way a lot of my paintings have gone. The show I had at the Mad Batter was titled "Places I Go". Well I basically I looked on a map and figured all the places I used to hide when I was in high school. (Laughing) When I wanted to get out of school early, you know, without a pass, these are the places I would go.
So anyway, I went to this place, I walked around, I was tired. I was painting all morning, it was the middle of the day, it was hot, probably not the best time to just decide to paint in the middle of a forest that's been torn down. I cam home, I looked at the photos that I had on my camera (I had shot some pictures while I was down there), I said, "you know what? I have to go back there, I have to. There's something going on there that I have to go back and maybe, at least, record. I'm not to save it, I'm not going to change it, but maybe I can record it." So I went back, and I did that painting there, a field study. I couldn't get enough emotion, that I thought was saying… it started to look pretty.
Liz: It does look pretty.
Stan: Right. And I said, you know, that's not necessarily what I should be doing. Then I thought, well, should I try to make it look ugly? What should I do? I don't know. I started leaving out information, I didn't put all the stumps in, I only put in one, and I said " there's something that I'm missing". So I took some more pictures, then all of a sudden, I turned the camera sideways, and took a vertical sort of picture. Then I realized, this could be an interesting of arrangement for a series of paintings. Well I came back, and worked like a madman, I did the drawings. I brought these drawings out to show you. I laid it out, and then I painted, I swear I painted it right through the night. Just kept painting, painting, painting, painting. Got up in the morning, after 4 or 5 hours sleep, started painting again, and really got it all done, about a week before the show. I was curious about how I was going to present it. As I did the foreground in the actual finished painting, it's very smooth, it's very open. One of the people who came to the show said, you know, you've really got something going in your paintings, you can feel the sand. In that other painting over there, you can feel the gravel. I'm like "he's a smart guy, he sees that's gravel". It's not only that it's orange, or dirt, but it really was, it was gravel. Because they had ripped off all the loam and the rich soil. So I can't say that all of sudden I'm a conservationist, but I love the county, I love the land, I love the whole area.
Liz: Whatever it is you were going for, you hit it in that triptych, though.
Stan: So I wanted it to be a little bit more like, OK, some people are going to see it and say, that's a beautiful painting. Some people are going to look at it and say, why are those trees standing there all by themselves? And someone else will look at it and say, hey, it looks like a golf course is going in. There were all those reactions the night of the opening. But what I said was, to myself, maybe it can be interpreted this way. People think that's beautiful, but in reality, it's horrible. It was just a very horrible thing that happened there. But as an artist, I worked with it, and thought maybe there was something that I could do to maybe restore some dignity to those trees. To maybe record that this is what happened there, before the grass goes in, before the golfers are hanging out. So I fooled with it a little bit, and, as you look through the triptych, you'll see on the right hand side, coming out of the woods, without trunks on them, are two globular shapes. And what they are is, they're man's trees. That's what's taking over. Round trees, shaped, pretty, organized. What we think, or people tend to think, are pretty.
As a contractor, my other field, I can't get people to buy native trees, because they're ugly, they're crooked, they're not straight. They don't get those pink flowers. On the other hand, people buy art. They buy paintings that I do of the wild areas, of crooked trees. So in there yard they want things too organized, hanging on their walls, they want the wild areas. So, it's funny. It makes me think a lot about what I'm going to say over the next few years as I paint, how I look at it. Obviously all artists throughout history have recorded the current events of their time, whether by accident or by design. I started looking back over my work. Luckily, enough of Cape May County is preserved, it won't be changed. But I know 12 years ago I bought my first painting. It was actually rather expensive. I was 26, 27 years old, and I went out and bought a painting for $850.00. I think that's like a $2000 or $3000 painting in today's prices. I bought this painting because it was exactly what I saw happening in Cape May County. There were farms all over the place. Old farmhouse, big empty lot. Every third or fourth one now had a sign on it, "DEVELOPMENT". You know, it's a classic argument, you see it in all the cartoons, ans the rabbits get chased out. But it was really happening here. We had just bought a house in Cape May Courthouse, and right across the street from us was a farm, and a field. Beautiful, old cabbages out there, 75-year-old farmer, no tractor, just a little roto-tiller. Boom, they put up a sign there "Soon to be Domino's Pizza". It bothered me, so I said "that painting means a lot to me" and I bought it. But I kept looking at that painting, and kept looking at it, kept thinking about how I paint, what I do. I think that painting cued me in to the idea that maybe, maybe being more involved in the arts. Maybe recording , painting things of this county. Like really finding the beauty. You know some of the statements that I say for the shows, I say that I try to record this for others to see.
Liz Right
Stan: And it is true because, people will come up to a painting I did when I kind of juice them up with some color just because the nature of pastels and just maybe I'm all vibrant or maybe I take a risk or two with it and they say "wow" and really, they like it. And you ask what they and they say, " I love the marshes and such' and you realize that maybe you're doing your work. Maybe that's exactly what you should be doing is making people realize 'that's just that stupid little farm field right up the street." "It is?" "That's the way I see it, I think a lot of other people see it that way". And I think that over time people realize that Cape May County, Cumberland County, the whole area, it's just glorious out here, it's gorgeous.
Liz: In a different respect, that's what the people in the Glasstown Nine have been doing. We're painting old dingy places that are getting knocked down because of all the new upscale stuff that is coming. I mean Carl has at least 3 paintings now of place that the next day they were torn down and now they are gone. He's got the only paintings that people have done of them, an old slaughterhouse, a couple of factories, and we're like "oh my god, it's gone."
Stan: Right, and Pat Witt was telling me about Shellpile. She said I am having a show next year, with all my paintings from the 60's and 70's of Shellpile, and none of that stuff is there anymore. And again the same thing is going on in cape may county, down there by the cape may canal. Lovely the township passed an ordinance they can't build any more condos. But they would put them right where the docks were, and then they would complain about the smell of the docks, and then the docks would close and then they would build more condos. I would say, if one of my voices as an artist is that I really think that we need to pay attention to these people who say that we need to save open spaces or that we need to at least slow down this sprawl; somebody has to do it sooner or later.
And, uh, the funny thing is sometimes ill put on the total other hat, "okay, we want to preserve farm fields", But always in these conversations with the green folks I say, you ought to have this conversation with the Indians and native American that were here 200 years ago and see how they feel about your farm fields.
Both: Laughing…
It's that not in my back yard, people build a house on a side street and they are the only house on that street and they don't like the neighbors that come, and then the 2 of them don't like the next neighbors that come, and somewhere along the line…
Liz: One thing I would like to talk about is your method, how do you work? You do a lot of plein-air. Do you go out and do the charcoal sketches first?
Stan: No. Usually I just go out and paint as if I am just shooting pictures just paint tiny studies. Sometimes I'll spend an hour or two in a little study because I have to. I'll do the studies and then I'll decide how big I want to make it as a studio painting. So I'll stick the study onto the wall, and I'll look at some photographs of it and I'll start to draw with charcoal on a sheet of paper that is about the size I would use for the painting. Then I can work out all the problems. But most of my paintings derive from drawings and plein-air. Even if I am just to work from a photograph, which I do, it's a photograph of which I actually painted before. I won't take a photograph of something and then never have actually have worked there artistically, because I won't feel connected.
That what I say to people that here and they want me to teach them a little bit about painting or drawing, and I think that is one of the first things I tell them; "you have to be willing to say well that didn't work, put it aside".
Liz: something are just not meant to be, put it down and move along.
Stan: Exactly, Sometimes I think people are not willing to do that, they feel they gotta keep working on it. That bottom cabinet over there is full of half starts.
Liz: What is this, copper?
Stan: yes
I paint on paper a lot, but paper buckles, paper stretches, paper hangs, paper does all the weird things is does. Paper's not forever. Some of the artists in the 1500s actually painted on copper.
Liz: Why copper?
Stan: because it lasts forever. It is permanent; it has a nice rigid support. There is a certain glow that comes from it, an apparent glow. I haven't been able to figure out the exact science needed to make it work for me yet. So when I paint on it I don't exactly know what's going to happen.
This is gesso board, this is Masonite, and then I put a little gesso on it with a little bit of pumice, burnt umber… um, I work a lot on sanded papers.
Lately I've been working on a paper called Wallace Sandpaper.
Liz" Where do you get that, at the artists supply store?
Stan: Yes, it is really easy. It is really the highest quality pastel paper that's available now. But once you paint on this you're committed.
Liz: You can't get rid of it.
Stan: Right. And recently I've been reading a book by Richard Ching(sp?) and it's funny… all the things that I was taught are somewhat different from the way he's teaching. He's saying that if you put a mark down, it had better be the mark that you want. You had better be happy with it; you shouldn't be trying to correct it. He goes, why bother putting it down in the first place, because if you're capable of putting a mark down you should be capable of putting the right mark down, and another mark next to it, and another one next to that. And build it, sort of like a puzzle, jigsaw paintings; a lot of artists work that way. There's not as many puzzle painters as there are layer painters, painter that do it all in layers. Which is the way I am. But it made me think that for clarity especially with pastels and sandpaper, if you really concentrate where you need it, and you use a modest amount of paint instead of a lot more. And if its too many layers you are just burying things, hiding things, mixing things.
What I am saying is with this paper you better be really ready to make your mark where you want it, or you just start chasing lines. You know how Pat Witt says there are the 'mud painters' that just keep mixing colors.
Liz: You said the show that you had in Millville was one of the only shows that you actually did the work for that show.
Stan: Right.
Liz: What are you working on now? Do you have another show coming up?
Stan: During the course of the Millville show I was able to put some of my paintings into juries for other shows for next year. What am I doing next? I am teaching for the University of Maryland in Ocean City. They have a week long art program that they bring in different instructors for. And there was a really nice reference from a fellow artist that said, "this guy does pastels." They called me up; I am going to go… I do like to teach, but there are still so many things I want to work out on my own before I go and teach too much. That is why I enjoy teaching people that are just starting out. I feel like I can cut them through so much of that learning curve… and everybody should experiment, they need to tie their own shoes, they need to figure out what they are doing, but… there are so many things you can do to cut corners, and a lot of it is material, and a lot of it is time. I take my art really seriously; I give it the time that it needs. I am lucky that I have this career that enables me to have free time. I am able to say that I am going to be painting for the next 3 or 4 days.
I realized that I haven't drawn from the figure in a long time, maybe as much as 2 years. I have this itch, and the Cape May County Art League had classes back in the winter which I didn't take for some reason, so standing around in the studio I did what so many artists have done, I took my shirt off and got a mirror and stuck it up on the wall and I started drawing from myself. That was really fun, and that is what whetted my appetite for going back and trying to work with figures. I have a model lined up for this fall and winter that I will work with. There has to be a progression in what I do. I love the landscapes; I always want to paint landscapes. But this show in Millville I left people out of the paintings on purpose. There are no people in any of the paintings.
A big influence on me, Ginny Tabor, wanted to paint, but she wanted to have a reason to be saying exactly what she was saying in her paintings. And I started thinking about that, and the people that are in paintings, and what makes them alive.
Are there any other books that you would recommend?
I recently met Bill Creevy; Pat Witt brought him in. I know when I took a book out of the library 10 or 12 years ago to learn about pastel painting, and this guy's work was talking to me. And it's funny, 12 years later, there he is standing in Pat Witt's driveway squirting water on pastel paintings, brushing them around and doing the same kind of thing that I like to do. Ands we had a good conversation. We talked about eventually trying to build pastels so that they do not have to be put behind glass. For whatever reason we want to do that, and I am not even sure why that is; it seems that people that do pastels with a lot of textures want to ditch the glass. Maybe we are having envy of oil paintings. It is frustrating as an artist that also frames a lot of his own work to have to be dealing with glass and mattes.
Liz: You don't put a fixative on yours, do you?
Stan: I do a lot with fixatives early on in the painting, with textures. But the last couple layers are nothing but pure pigment. Very, very soft pastel on a very rough surface. So it hangs on the paper. When you move around and you look at a pastel, and I think this is what gets people excited about pastels, they're not sure why they are attracted to it other than they like the subject matter, but it's the fact that it is just a bunch of dust or minerals hanging there on a piece of paper. It doesn't have a liquid look to it, and it doesn't have a stained look like watercolors. If you do liquefy them (apply fixative) you kind of kill them. So if you just leave them behind glass, you can enjoy the way the light hits all the edges.
Liz: Where can your work be seen?
Stan: I always have work in my studio. People always visit me here. If they are not careful, I sometimes tell them too much. I kind of go dry in the throat if someone wants to talk about art.
Ocean Galleries in Stone Harbor and Avalon, they have been very supportive of me.
This year I plan on traveling a lot.
Like poets and writers, you are not going to do anything new unless you take a chance, do something absurd,
Liz: Talk about your workshop at ACC
Stan: What I'll do at ACC, they asked me to teach at their Saturday workshop… what I'll do is ask the put their pastels away for a little while, because the first thing we are going to do is draw. Hopefully by the end of the class there will be enough information given out that they will learn to use the pastels in moderation.
Some of the things that we covered here, knowing when things are just not right. You just park them. And knowing to have a reason. Doug Dawson said to me in a class I had with him years ago, he said, "if you are going to be painting something, there ought to be a good reason you are painting it." You have to have that thought pass through your head at least once, "why am I painting this? What is the one thing that I am trying to convey here?"
If it is a bowl and the way the light hits the edge, and that means enough to you, fine. If it is a field and it is a hot day, get it in there. Somehow get it in there. But that's what's going to be needed when the viewer looks at it. I read this about Albert Handell, he is a great pastel painter. Someone asked him what he looks for in a painting. He goes "that one little thing." And it may just be a fleck of yellow on a branch somewhere, but it is something that makes it alive, that makes it unique. There has to be some sort of spark in it, something that bites. That's important, to have your own artistic vision in these pieces.
Liz: I heard this quote, unfortunately I do not know the artist's name, but I had to write down this quote, it was so good. She said, "Art is something from inside that is pulled into the physical world." I thought that was so profound.
Stan: There are a couple of things that really resonate with me. One is the creation of art that you make up there, on your paper, is like a record. I recorded that event right there, and you look at it and play it. That creativity that you are doing, it's not about making it right, it's not about making it these colors… it's about your eyes, your hand, your medium and your subject matter, and the interaction that happens for that hour. It's that connection of those parts, how your hand, eye materials create something. When you put yourself in the right place, in a decent frame of mind and just paint, I think that you succeed.
