James Everett Stanley, 'He Will Not Let Your Foot Slip', 2007
Oil on canvas, 48"x36"
Encountering James Everett Stanley's "The Hills and the Plains" paintings at Bucket Rider, I felt as if Ernest Hemingway or Ted Nugent should be waiting just around the corner since the paintings capture such a rugged masculinity.
The subjects, men who I can't help but imagine smell gamey and pungent, are dressed in camouflage, submerged in bodies of water, or posed with dead antelopes. They evoke not only rampant masculinity, but also a rugged individualism. These are men who would have heeded the call to go west. At times these figures not only dominate the composition of the pieces, they also dominate the washed out sky and loom over the landscape. They may confront the world around them to survive, they may show the wear of enduring the conflict against their world, but they will not lose. They are atomic in the most classical sense of the word--they will not split, they will not fracture.
However, they also inhabit our world and confront everything from modern weaponry to contemporary fatherhood. In Stanley's confrontation with fatherhood, "He Will Not Let Your Foot Slip", the painting surges with masculine power over the land and sky. The washed out colors echo the wilderness at the height of day. These colors, which in reproduction can be misread as effete pallor, are as clear and powerful as the brush strokes. The subject's sneering, ruddy face bears down on the viewer. His half-hooded eyes size the viewer up, and his worn-down, wrinkled but clean canvas shirt suggests the vast extent of his wilderness and survival skills. His arms hang at his sides. The bulges and recesses of his biceps promise swiftness and power if he were to act.
The arms remain inert, not doing what one would expect of a father. For although his child sleeps comfortably strapped to his chest sleeps, it seems to be psychically disconnected from the father. The father seems oblivious to its weight, but perhaps if viewed with a more tender heart the sneer contains a hint of pride. That is to say, the subject not only dominates his surroundings whether barren hill or viewer, but he is also capable of creating life.
The title originally a line from Psalm 121 is no longer referring to the power of God. Instead this figure, through his power to dominate, create and protect has become godlike. His masculinity approaches a mythic but ultimately untenable potency. The tension between mythic male power needed for the frontier and the more cosmopolitan necessity needed for modern life give the paintings a certain nostalgic and violent charm.
Nicholas Hayes
James Everett Stanley: The Hills and the Plains
Bucket Rider Gallery
Until 19 January 2008
835 W Washington
Chicago IL 60607
Nicholas Hayes holds an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His creative work includes fiction, poetry and an occasional piece of criticism and has appeared in various journals including Bloom, 5_trope, queerPhilosophy, Lodestar Quarterly, Eleven Eleven and Suspect Thoughts. He is currently collaborating on queerly contemporary retellings of Greek myths with Terri Griffith.
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