Individuals: Visual Artists: Pat Stanley

Artist's Statement

Pat Stanley’s paintings examine and codify today’s architectural landscape by way of a memory of the past from the standpoint of the future. The exquisite balance of structure and chaos creates an ambivalent nostalgia for the ever-changing forms and totems of today’s concrete landscape. Familiar structures of Toronto’s landscape – New City Hall, the Hilton Hotel, ManuLife Financial, Rochdale College, the Gardiner Expressway - are in Pat Stanley’s acute perception transformed by the future impact of the natural world.

These concrete symbols of our North American urban culture become archetypal elements in a future album of a past civilization. There are no figures, no cars, no man-made elements other than the structures themselves, which are rendered monumental in their decline.

Pat Stanley is a pictorial historian of the inevitable dominance of environmental transformation over man-made permanence. The paintings at once celebrate this triumph and hold in awe and reverence the concrete monuments of contemporary urban civilization.

Bio

Pat was born in Ottawa, and studied drawing and painting in Montreal at the School of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, at McGill University, and at Concordia University School of Art.  She has also studied at Toronto’s Three Schools of Art and Toronto School of Art, and at the Haliburton School of the Arts.  Pat is a member of the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts in Toronto, the Colborne Society of Artists; and the Pontiac Artists’ Association in Quebec, and has held a position on the Board of the Arts Council of Northumberland since 2007.

Pat’s  work has been accepted into numerous juried shows, and she has been offered several curated solo shows, including one at the Art Gallery of Northumberland in November 2009.  Her next solo show is scheduled for November 2010 at the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts in Toronto.  Her paintings have won local, national, and international awards.

Pat’s work explores the tensions generated by the interaction of man-made and natural landscapes.  She uses experimental painting techniques and a mixture of both abstract and representational imagery to capture the effects of environmental stress on both urban and rural structures, and is continuing to explore new ways of communicating the impact of environmental degradation.

Art (click image to enlarge)

Email:
Website: www.patstanleystudio.com, www.lostbeach.ca