Currently at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art
By Anna Pier
The marvelous new show at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, The Real-Life Art History of M. Louise Stanley, is huge in every sense of the word. This grand collection of the petite artist’s works is from 1991 to the present. It offers giant canvasses, paintings of all sizes, small ink sketches and drawings from her sketchbooks and journals, socio-political commentary presented as illuminated manuscript pages, protest posters, and various objects including a painted upholstered chair, and a corner “wallpapered” with copies of pages from her journals.
At the Opening Reception on September 26, there was a joyful buzz. Everyone seemed captivated by this remarkable collection displaying the richness, ebullience, erudition, grandeur, humor, and glory to be found in the works of this Bay area artist. Fortunately, it will be on exhibit until January 24 next year, because you will want to return, and come again with friends.
The artist, whose studio is in the Emeryville Artist’s Co-op, draws abundantly from many sources, including Greek and Roman mythology; art and literature; early Italian and Renaissance painting; illuminated manuscripts; the Bible, and the Virgin Mary. Her use of these rich sources is irreverent and joyous. In her painting Snake Oil, Stanley depicts a confident, unrepentant Eve as a carnival barker sitting by her wares, snake oil and apples, outside the locked gates of Eden.
Discussing her smaller painting, Jupiter and Io, she asserts that Zeus and Juno’s squabbles make “better copy” to tell the story of marital squabbles. She sees this as a great way to “monumentalize the trivial.”
Stanley explains that she doesn’t try to be funny. Things just come to her. For instance, after painting Truncis naribus (Faces without noses), which depicts damaged Roman statuary, it just came to her to add the Groucho nose. Stanley writes about her humor, “I have found humor to be a useful tool for addressing darker issues. It is an unconscious element which I don’t dare question. Sometimes I just get lucky.”
Her father was a professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley, and she and her sister grew up in part on the Berkeley campus. They later lived near The Huntington Museum, and Louise would go there on her bike daily, where she especially loved seeing the Gutenberg bible, and the Gainsborough paintings.
When she was at La Verne College, a Brethren school, she rode her motor scooter to Scripps College for a painting class. Soon the LaVerne dean called her in to reprimand her about the drawings of nude women in her dorm room. Stanley commented with a twinkle, “It was then I realized that art is my religion.
Graduating from LaVerne in 1964, she discovered California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC). As the artist described her days at the East Bay college, “We met in the graveyard at night. We had to invent ourselves – and this was long before the Women’s Movement.” The going school of painting at the time was Abstract Expressionism – black and white, big, oil, no figures. So, Stanley explains, “we had to rebel.”
She continued, “At CCAC I felt I needed to develop a persona, and I started caricaturing.” Stanley, who holds a BFA and MFA from CCAC, explains that she wanted to capture the “flavor of a person after they left the room – not what they look like.” Another way she explains this is, “You don’t paint what you’re seeing, you paint how you feel about it.”
Stanely taught art for many years, until she developed an allergy to paint solvents and could not be around the students’ studio. She would tell her students, “The things you don’t like about your work, that’s who you are – get used to it.”
In 1981, she developed a character who inhabits her paintings – and Stanley points out adamantly that her alter-ego figure predates ‘Where’s Waldo’ – as the ‘Archetypal Artist.’ With spiky red hair, dressed in a red and white-striped jersey and bright green Capri pants, the figure first appeared in a watercolor, The Artist Buries a Reject in the Middle of the Night. She participates in many paintings; when not present, sometimes her clothing appears, as in a laundry basket or neatly folded. She is part of the audience, perched on the edge of the stage to watch as the Fates are measuring and cutting life spans. She is the dancing partner in The Anatomy Lesson. Stanley taught human anatomy for twenty years and was popular with students for dancing with the skeleton.
Using humor and wit, Stanley paints in the tradition of history and narrative painting, documenting current and fictitious events using myth, and other classic techniques. Athena would be her patron goddess. With her wry scrutiny, she examines the foibles of contemporary society and political issues. Remote Access is a commentary on how technology can keep us away from the creative process.
Louise Stanley is thrilled with Sonoma Valley Museum of Art’s presentation of her work, crediting Margie Maynard, Deputy Director, Engagement & Exhibitions, for her brilliant vision and organization of the show.
Maynard reminds, however, that the work of curating a show is a team effort. She commented that from the time she and SVMA Director Linda Keaton first visited Stanley at her studio in Emeryville, “Lulu was a dream to work with, answering in detail, making suggestions, listening carefully.” At her studio, Maynard discovered that Stanley was “not so much a creative storyteller as, for the most part, a keen observer of human behavior. She combines this with her ability to capture the scenes in pen and ink unfolding before her in nearly real time.” Hence Maynard came up with the show’s title, The Real-life Art History of M. Louise Stanley.
The exhibition can be seen Wednesday through Sunday, 11-5, at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, 551 Broadway, Sonoma, until January 24, 2027.
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