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A computer is not a brush. My works explore the computer media without appropriating past styles or imitating other techniques. I try to free the computer to be its own medium, as different from paint, photomontage, or other media as television is from radio. As a brush is not a pencil, a computer need not be a brush.
The artworks reflect how forces and energies beyond our usual observations affect our world. The borders/boundaries in the works hint at underlying realities, underlying mysteries, underlying order - beyond usual perception.
Nature reveals many examples of inherent, yet hidden, forces. Underlying the beauty seen in the subtle sweep of the northern lights are two forces that cannot be seen - the Earth's magnetic field and particles of the solar wind. Similarly, some prairies in Illinois were once under an ocean now thousands of miles away. There is order in these fluctuations and changes. Also hidden and mysterious is the fate, destiny, or coincidence which brings people together or separates them from a love. Thus, moments and phenomena are "ordered" by underlying, often unseen, energies. Off, past the boundary of normal perception, is the energy which underlies appearances. What happens on one side of that boundary impacts an event on the other side.
Until the most recent works, edges of the main field touch this edge of perception (as seen in the work at the top left of this page). In the works shown at this site, the suggestion of worlds beyond the usual is implied by spaces and dissonances among the objects. Now, serene order is more an enigma.
Images are in chronological order.
All images are Copyright (C) Robert Stanley All Rights Reserved - No Commercial Use
He feels the twin pulls of dynamic media and static painting. There is a struggle between serene stasis and contemporary dynamic. Now exhibiting in Chicago and teaching college in nearby Des Plaines, IL, Stanley recently worked on creating multimedia programs and websites. This work taps into dynamics, outreach, multimedia, immediate significance. His computer artworks and paintings go in a different direction. Here, beneath the careening activity of the contemporary world, are serenity and order. Like nature, simple in its mystery. Like Heraclitus, never stepping into the same river twice.
Born in Florida in 1942 Robert Stanley lived in Ohio until school in New York. The rolling hills of Ohio influenced his sense of timelessness. New York introduced him to frenetics. Since graduate school he has lived, exhibited, and taught in Cincinnati Ohio, Dayton Ohio, Richmond Indiana, Harrisburg, PA, and Chicago. At Oakton College in Des Plaines, IL he introduced computers into the design course in 1983 and convened the first statewide conference of universities and community colleges on computers in the curriculum. Stanley lives in a farmhouse with a painting studio now moved upstairs from a leaky basement, a computer setup in an old guestroom, a new dog, Jesse, and his wife, Jane. He enjoys the visits of his three children, who still live in the area.
It seems quiet enough, but tensions abound. Fantasizing Heraclitus, he still dips his toes in the river.
ROBERT STANLEY
rstanley@oakton.edu.
Oakton College
1600 E. Golf Rd.
Des Plaines IL, 60016
voice 708-635-1827 fax 708-635-1987
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