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| Artist Witnesses 9/11 by Joanna Wilson Witness by Nancy Princenthal A Delicate Medium for a Raw Subject by Edward Sozanski Michener Art Museum Presents Todd Stone Tribeca Film Festival Award | |||||||
 | TODD STONE by John Mendelsohn Paintings always bring us to their very edge and then ask us to enter their virtual reality. Todd Stone paints intensely-seen representations of the world, making us acutely aware of that limbinal state when looking merges with being. In a series of landscapes, the artist depicts a fine-grained vision of nature, where the simplest scene is full of endless, stippled complexities. Rather than standing back, observing the scene he paints, he seems surrounded by it. Significantly, the ponds or streams that run through these landscapes often become the focus of our vision, rather than solid land that borders them. The power of water to cleanse and renew is suggested in watercolors of an old bathtub that looms like a baptismal font, a coffin or a womb. With the tub empty the pleasure and release it promises are held in abeyance. All is made manifest in images of sea rocks and moving water. With dancing flecks of foam and sunlight, water and land dissolve before our eyes. In recent painting of swimming pools, artifice and instinct seem to be in perfect equipoise. Pools, like gardens, are nature made at once human and perfect, and Stone paints them as a kind of Eden. It is an intensely blue paradise, where we are barely aware of a world beyond its margins. It is a world unto itself, comprised of scintillating, psychedelic reflections, and marbleized light caught in its depths. When the human form appears, it is just a pair of feet, no longer standing their ground, but floating toes up, the artist’s immersion now complete. Stone gives us shifting visions of our relationship to the visible world. In the process, he asks us the riddle: “How can we both capture and let flow life’s ever changing waters?” John Mendelsohn has written art review and articles for Cover Magazine, The Jewish Week, Artnet, and Internet magazine. His essays have appeared in a number of exhibition catalogs. Primarily focusing on contemporary art and photography, he has also written on historical exhibitions. | ||||||
| Todd Stone / Emerging Artist Art and Antiques - January 2005 [ Article with pictures as a printable PDF - 2 megs ] “I’m an oil painter in watercolors,” says Todd Stone, who works in both media and whose recent series have featured garden scenes, pools of water and (sometimes empty) bathtubs. He draws inspiration for his landscapes from traversing the area surrounding the country home he and his wife, Lori, own in eastern Pennsylvania’s Bucks County—a practice that sometimes finds him standing knee-deep in the Delaware River. His cityscapes often depict the view from his studio in lower Manhattan. At 8:45 on the morning of September 11, 2001, Stone was standing at his window, six blocks from the World Trade Center, when the first jet pierced the North Tower. Later that morning, camera at his eye, he watched from a nearby rooftop as the 2 South Tower collapsed. He spent the rest of the day photographing and drawing, and from these images he produced 18 watercolors, at times mixing into the paint some of the thick dust that settled in his studio when the Towers fell. The result is a collection he titled “The Witness Series.” METHOD OF WORK Stone begins his compositions by drawing while within the landscape—“a very basic eye-hand practice,” he says. These sketches provide the mental image upon which he ultimately bases his paintings. “I paint what I freeze in my brain,” he says. “The watercolor might not be exactly what I was looking at, but rather the image that was created in my brain and from the act of drawing.” Often, the watercolors serve as “a jumping-off place” for Stone’s oil paintings. “Oil painting is a more contemplative practice,” he explains. “You have a different emotional range because of the physicality of the paint. There’s a body to the oil paintings, which adds a certain gravitas that is difficult to attain in watercolors—but I try to do it.” FIRST ARTISTIC INSPIRATION As a child, art was not a part of Stone’s world. “I didn’t know you could be an artist,” he says. It wasn’t until Stone enrolled at Wesleyan University in Connecticut as a religion major that he began to draw—mostly religious imagery. BIGGEST BREAK In 1976 the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Stone a grant, which allowed him to establish a body of work. MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSON Although Stone says that Mark Rothko “made me want to be a painter,” it was Larry Calcagno (1913–93), an abstract-expressionist landscape painter, who left a dominant impression. Stone met Calcagno after he graduated from the University of New Mexico, and Calcagno became something of a mentor in Stone’s life as well as in his art. Stone rented one of his first Manhattan studios—a $125-a-month Bowery loft—from Calcagno, and whenever his friend visited the city, Stone allowed him to use the space. And Calcagno reciprocated by giving Stone access to his New Mexico studio. “He did it out of generosity, not to make money,” Stone says. “He liked helping young artists.” A native San Franciscan, Calcagno traveled the world, cultivating a coterie of patrons “who loved him and loved his work,” Stone says. “I was always impressed by his independence and his ability to survive outside the New York City art scene. He was a role model of taking responsibility for yourself as an artist, for leading your life as an artist.” FAVORITE SUBJECT MATTER “I paint what it is like to be Todd Stone in this world,” the artist says. “It’s my leap of faith that if [the subject] resonates with me, and it’s important enough to catch my eye and demand of my time to make the painting, then there’s something there that resonates with the viewer. I made a conscious decision to make it ‘smaller’: to paint myself in the tub rather than myself on a mountaintop, to paint my studio, my wife, my dog.” ONE EXPERT’S OPINION “Watercolor is a tough medium to work and a tough medium to get accepted as serious,” says Gene Cooper, professor emeritus of American Art History at the University of California at Long Beach. “Yet Todd has managed to overcome a lot of watercolor’s negative baggage as a medium that genteel women learn how to use in the salon.” AWARDS Besides the NEA grant, Stone received a travel grant from the John Anson Kittredge Educational Fund in 2003, which enabled him to fly to Florence, Italy, to show pieces from “The Witness Series” at the Biennale Internazionale Dell’Arte. PRICE RANGE OF WORK $1,000 to $15,000 REPRESENTATION Stone is self-represented. 212.732.9034. www.toddstone.com. —Christopher Hann | |||||||
Pools and Reflections by Gerrit Henry It’s been a long time coming. For the past 20 years or so, Stone had been a committed abstractionist – “Braque and Kandinsky, Mondrian and Pollock,” he says, “these were my masters.” The results were biomorphic, semi-gestural jottings in warm, clean coloristic tones that bespoke Stone’s conviction of “the interrelatedness of all things” in hearty, yet delicate, measure. A protégé, however – especially of such mentors as the above – can only go at it for so long without a certain despiritualization setting in. On trips in the ‘90s to his rural retreat in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Stone became aware of – indeed, became possessed by – the surrounding landscape. Soon he was doing winter landscape along the Delaware River “four months of the year,” he remembers. “My hands were always cold. It took me months to thaw out.” Eventually, he would be seeking, and seeking hard, not to map “natural patterns of change, but to capture the transcendent moment” in nature. In another of the many aesthetic awakenings that have gone to make up his recent career, the formerly snowbound Stone discovered a world of landscape in his own house – “I saw the landscape in the bathtub,” he says. “The oceanic feeling you get when you’re by the water? That’s there, if your focus is there. The mountains – they’re there.” As was, perhaps preeminently, Stone’s body. He began to “portray the way it looks to me being in me, the way I look to myself in my body.” Hence, the slyly ubiquitous feet – as well as, on a more substantive note, “the water, the reflection, and the light.” At the same time, Stone – who had been tending small gardens since his days as a young artist on a Bowery rooftop – became an avid outdoor gardener. Stone “began to paint the garden. I wanted to put more pleasure in my life. Over time, we built a swimming pool. It was the ultimate mirror! I loved being there.” Thus, too, the work of the past two years – Stone’s feet caught in his own gaze, looking straight down without failing to note every surrounding aspect of shape and color and line. In the mid-sized Summer Break, spread-apart feet both expose and cozy themselves in the pool, intimate harbingers of the soulish refreshment to come. In Poolscape III, hills, sun, even bits of the garden are reflected in the luminously blue water, a water that often bespeaks imagistic perfection in Stone’s handling of the substance in, neatly enough, watercolor. And, in Steps, the view from above to a terraced sequence of descents plays up the lure, and perhaps the danger, of sliding on in. The poolside paintings are wonderful kinds of glosses on themselves, myriad “reflections,” to paraphrase Carson McCullers, “in a blue eye.” The tub scenes – without or with finny appendages – catch us along to memories of childhood baths and first self-explorations, this time, at least, without adult supervision. A fascination with the body’s terrain is equaled, for Stone, by a fascination with the vehicle for such curiosity, the bathtub. In In The Tub, no one is: the filling vessel resembles a pod or spacecraft that enthralls us with the promise of perhaps cosmic secrets to be revealed. “One of the joys of my life is hot baths,” says Stone, and the bathtubs series deals with “being immersed in fluid – with immersion, enclosure, and containment” and the eventual release. And the aesthetic – even the psychophilosophical – outcome of it all? Stone likes to see himself poolside, or in the pool (or tub), working along in the matter and manner of his perceptions and revelations as steadily as the hum of the pool filter below. “I capture the moment,” he explains. “I’m there, and I recognize it, It’s meditative. It’s quiet. But under the surface, there’s work going on.” Gerrit Henry is a contributing editor for Art News and reviews monthly for Art in America. He has published feature and critical articles in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, People, After Dark, and Art International, and has served as art critic for The New Republic. | |||||||
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