Stanley Boydston was born 1959 in Muskogee, Oklahoma. A member of the Cherokee Nation, he now resides in Ojai, California. He began oil painting under the tutelage of his grandmother since the age of two. Formal training took place at the University of Texas at Austin. He moved to Madrid, Spain in 1982 and began exhibiting professionally that year as well. He was the only North American painter permanently residing and exhibiting in Madrid during the period there, known as, “La Movida,” that encompassed the entire decade of the 1980’s. He recently was invited to show in the 58th Venice Bienial of 2019. He has recently been awarded an, “artist in residency,” award for 2020, by the, “Biennale de Arte Sacre,” in Menton, France.
My current investigation in painting is a questioning of my own lifelong interest in baroque line and drawing. At some point in early 2019, I decided to no longer make a curved line of any kind in my paintings. My subject matter for several years previous had been one of the most interesting surf spots in the world: “Rincon.” In California, on the county line between Ventura and Santa Barbara, this, “point break,” is known for having the appearance of a, “ladder,” of lines that climb upward towards the horizon. As a child of the 70’s, it’s easy for me to pick out the brightest, most challenging and exaggerated color of a sunset that I’ve seen over the Pacific Ocean to start with. I’ll let the intensity of that color dictate tone and space for the rest of the work. My personal desire within that initial, “seed of intensity,” seems to be balancing an extreme realism with abstraction. As an example of this I can point to, “primitives,” like Grandma Moses or Camille Bombois, where horizontal depictions become, “stacked,” - space and volume becomes palpable, almost like a mental filing cabinet: wide open – yet a very intimate view into artist’s head.