ARTIST STATEMENT

"An Up-Close Stillness"

             Struck by a glimpse of heightened consciousness as a boy of around five, paint and brush eventually found their way — decades later — to the memory of this precocious awakening.

             At first haltingly and hesitantly, it would slowly become convincingly clear that this had been a truly defining event for my art and life. A one-time experience, it occurred during an evening in the late 1950s at the officers' club on a U. S. Gulf Coast naval base where my father was stationed: an expansive rooftop veranda with its pearl balustrade; a family meal on that terrace; and, crucially, a brash luminescent moon way above and slightly to the left. Entirely full, its crystalline clarity seemed especially mysterious to me — transfigured, through an up-close examination with binoculars — the kind which swivel atop a stand riveted to the ground and whir at the introduction of a coin. Further, there was a stretch of land some distance below, anchoring my elevated vista. Then, the looming ocean.

             Regaining the undiminished power of that original impetus has always necessitated a keenly directed effort: the ambition to render a specific imaginative memory through art.

             Throughout my later artistic endeavors, even when the elemental scene is not distinctly visible, it does nevertheless continue to pulsate from inside all the configurations. In fact, as my work evolves, the foundational setting has been revealing itself increasingly through inference — an implied existence.

            This core of my oeuvre further lends itself to experiencing the entire content as a form of 'story,' one whose unity — in spite of many outward variations — also makes possible the emergence of an overall mood or tone. Here is the poetic essence of what has been termed "The Magical Spaces of Stanford Brent." *