Tom Stanley
Painting
Lives and works in Durham, NC
(b. 1950, American)
“We all have the ability to think with our hands and our eyes. We have to continue to find ways to utilize that and it might be in new ways we haven’t thought of before…it’s what humanizes us.”
ARTIST STATEMENT
I suspect my recent work has been informed by a number of ideas including my desire to consider the exterior and the interior, or the poetry of simple silhouette shapes, or memories of growing up in my mother’s boardinghouse in Concord, N.C. She took in Cuban and Hungarian refugees; the Italian orphan cab driver from New York; and all sorts of roomers that as a child I just thought of as roomers in what was then the mill town where we lived. There were just houses where people lived and we all needed a place to live. We still do and that is one thought that has lived in this work. Yet when push comes to shove, my acrylic on canvas or on paper paintings rely on a contrast between mechanical drawing and surface, between abstraction and imagery, and the conversation between my eyes and hands.
ABOUT
- Tom Stanley is an artist and arts administrator/educator.
- He served as the first gallery director of Winthrop University Galleries and then as Chair of Winthrop’s Department of Fine Arts.
- Prior to Rock Hill he was director of the Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury, N.C.; Assistant Professor of Art at Barry University in Miami, Fla.; and Assistant Professor of Art and Historic Preservation at Lyon College in Batesville, Ark.
- He received an MA in Applied Art History and an MFA in Painting from the University of South Carolina.
- Prior to grad school, he worked as a resident designer in the wall accessory industry in Passaic, N.J. and New York City.
- He was born in Fort Hood, Texas, grew up in Concord, N.C., and has lived in Rock Hill, S.C. for the past 30 years.
- In 2018, Tom Stanley received the Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Governor’s Awards for the Arts, South Carolina’s highest arts honor.
PRESS + MEDIA
Tom Stanley And His Art Show Us A Deeply Human Type Of Creativity
[QC Exclusive]
Art in Process: In the Studio with Tom Stanley
[Happenings CLT]
Winthrop Professor Emeritus Tom Stanley Awarded South Carolina’s Highest Arts Honor
[Winthrop University]
Tom Stanley: SCRATCHING THE SURFACE
[Halsey Institute]
Visiting Artist Series – Episode 2 – Tom Stanley
[Gibbes Museum; Video]