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Todd Stone
June 21 - Sunday, August 3
Watercolor artist and gardener Todd Stone exhibits his series "In the Garden" in the Steinhardt Conservatory Gallery. Stone's work is painted directly from nature, incorporating his sense of light, color and depth-of-field.
Artist's Statement
Paintings always bring us to their very edge and then ask us to enter their virtual reality. Todd Stone paints intensely-seen representations of the world, making us acutely aware of that liminal state when looking merges with being.
In a series of landscapes, the artist depicts a fine-grained vision of nature, where the simplest scene is full of endless, stippled complexities. Rather than standing back, observing the scene he paints, he seems surrounded by it. Significantly, the ponds or streams that run through these landscapes often become the focus of our vision, rather than solid land that borders them.
The power of water to cleanse and renew is suggested in watercolors of an old bathtub that looms like a baptismal font, a coffin or a womb. With the tub empty the pleasure and release it promises are held in abeyance. All is made manifest in images of sea rocks and moving water. With dancing flecks of foam and sunlight, water and land dissolve before our eyes.
In recent painting of swimming pools, artifice and instinct seem to be in perfect equipoise. Pools, like gardens, are nature made at once human and perfect, and Stone paints them as a kind of Eden. It is an intensely blue paradise, where we are barely aware of a world beyond its margins. It is a world unto itself, comprised of scintillating, psychedelic reflections, and marbleized light caught in its depths. When the human form appears, it is just a pair of feet, no longer standing their ground, but floating toes up, the artist's immersion now complete.
Stone gives us shifting visions of our relationship to the visible world.
In the process, he asks us the riddle: "How can we both capture and let flow life's ever changing waters?"
—John Mendelsohn
Biography
Todd Stone has been tending gardens since his days as a young artist on a Bowery rooftop in 1974. His abstract painting mapped natural processes. Though Stone had always painted landscapes to inform his abstractions, he recently turned wholeheartedly to exploring new ways to remake the traditional genre. Almost as a reaction against years of working within the confines of a studio, and in a rigorous mode of abstraction, Stone now allowed his art to become freer, more spontaneous, and open to the surrounding world. Working in traditional landscape media ranging from oil, to watercolor, pastel, and ink and pencil, Stone paints in his Bucks County garden and has executed works while knee deep in the Delaware River, on cross-country skis by a frozen Adirondack lake, standing in the mud flats of the Florida Keys and his Tribeca window.
Todd Stone has exhibited in diverse galleries in New York since 1974. This past year his work was shown at The New York Historical Society, Museum of the City of New York, MMC Gallery of Marymount Manhattan College, Bronx River Art Center and Exit Art in Soho. In 2003 he is having solo exhibitions at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Wichita Falls Museum, Ellen Noel Art Museum and the Waterworks Art Center. Stone has been nominated to represent the United States in 2003 at the Biennale Internazionale Dell'Arte Contemporanea, Florence, Italy. Stone's landscape work has been featured in one-person exhibitions at the Frederic Remington Museum, Lake Placid Art Center and in group exhibitions at Delaware Center of Contemporary Art, Lafayette College Gallery, and Bridgewater/Lustberg Gallery. The abstraction which Stone practiced throughout the 1970's and 1980's had been featured in one-person exhibitions at Galerie Meissner, Hamburg, Germany, and Williams College Art Museum. Stone is a recipient of the State Museum of Pennsylvania Painting Award (1997) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Painting (1976). He was recently awarded a grant from the Puffin Foundation (2003).
Stone's work has been placed in numerous corporate and private collections, including Atlantic Richfield Corporation, Citicorp, Napa Valley Opera, Readers Digest Inc., and Time Warner Inc. He has participated in the Art in Embassies Program, Washington, D.C.
Todd Stone received a BFA from the University of New Mexico (1974), where he majored in lithography, drawing and sculpture. Stone has lived in New York since the 1970's, but also lived for a time in Umbria, Italy during the early 1980's. He currently resides and paints in New York City and Kintnersville, Pennsylvania.
Artist's Résumé
