‘Think of Me When It Thunders’ an exhibition of works by Larry Stanton a talented queer portraitist from the 80’s

Larry Stanton was an American portrait artist in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1980s whose work was championed by his peers such as David Hockney, Henry Geldzahler, and Ellsworth Kelly He was also one of the many talented queer men who died prematurely as a victim of the AIDS pandemic ….. he was just 37 years old at the time.  However, his legacy of work is not forgotten  …. some of which are in the permanent collection of the Leslie Lohman Gallery, and now he has a solo show,  THINK OF ME WHEN IT THUNDERS at C L E A R I N G Los Angeles.   Incidentally, the title is a reference to one of the last things Stanton said to his longtime lover, Arthur Lambert, while on his hospital deathbed.  The latter later lamented that “it doesn’t thunder every day.”

As well as his lover, Lambert….some 13 years older than Stanton, being his muse, the artist confided  that it was his dream  to repay Arthur’s love, trust, and faith by becoming a respected artist

David Hockney said this about him ” Larry Stanton was a portraitist.  Skill in portraiture is an instinct, it cannot be taught (the only “method” it can have is a dreary measurement, but even that without instinct is not very interesting.)

The portraitist is an observer of people, his attitudes and feelings will be reflected in his observations and usually the interest in personality makes one study faces, other aspects of personality show in the body;  posture, ways of moving, etc., but most is revealed in the face.  People make their own faces and Larry knew this instinctively.

Larry was always drawing people.  Place didn’t seem to matter to Larry and so most of the time he stayed put, following Rembrandt’s advice to his students:  “Do not travel . . not even to Italy.”

So Larry stayed in New York.  I met him in California in 1968, yet always regarded him as a New Yorker;  he rarely left Manhattan, indeed his area of Manhattan was quite small, but measured by Larry, it was very large.  As his paintings developed, so did his desire to stay in one place as he found it provided all he needed for his art.

Whenever I visited New York I usually saw Larry, enticing him out of his ten square blocks to go to the opera or a museum.  I would visit his studio.  Always there were portraits.  Some of his subjects I knew, most of them I didn’t, but one can always feel if a ‘likeness’ is there.  One feels it and as Larry’s work moved out of ‘generalized’ faces to more subtle descriptions of character and personality, I knew he was growing as an artist.He didn’t exhibit much.  Like most portraitists he was shy about showing his work, the worry about ‘likeness’, (perhaps a wrong notion) always seems to intervene.  A kind of naïve notion that the portrait IS them seems to take place.

Larry struggled with this and slowly his struggle was beginning to bear fruit, a fact which is visible in the selection of his drawings and paintings reproduced here.

If there was no one available to sit for him, Stanton made work of himself, and more seldomly, landscapes or still lives. The cartoonish effects of the primary color-dominated Self Portrait (1981) and Greenwich Village street scene, Sharidan Square (1982), for example, are at odds with the stifling realism of his untitled, undated Hockney-inspired swimming pool. He also experimented with abstraction and the imposition of writing, as with the untitled and undated pastel of “doodles” (for lack of a better term) of nails, cigarettes, his eyes, and his beloved cat, interspersed between the names of men, the days he saw them, and presumably, one of their telephone numbers. Importantly, two of his last-ever works (the Hospital Drawings, both 1984), are adorned with words of affirmation: “I’m going to make it.”

Accompanied by a mixtape compiled by the critic and East Village fixture Vince Aletti, “Think of Me When It Thunders” exemplifies the singularity of Stanton’s life and work and its significance as a record of queer history

The exhibition also explores Stanton’s experiences through a collection of Super 8 videos from the artist’s personal archive. These films offer an intimate glimpse into his friendship with David Hockney. A highlight of the show is a striking video capturing Hockney at work on his Paper Pools series at the Ken Tyler workshop in 1978—providing rare footage of his creative process.

A post shared by C L E A R I N G (@clearing_ny_la)

https://docent-art.com/galleries/clearing                                   through April 5.