Len Stokes

Artist bio/Statement

L E N S T O K E S

Leonard Stokes’ undergraduate work at Yale was conducted under the faculty assembled by Josef Albers during his tenure there. Chief among the extraordinary educators were Sewell Stillman, Erwin Hauert,and Neil Welliver. The artist says that those years marked the moment when he first began to see, and when the centrality of perception, color and form became deeply ingrained. While he remained at Yale for graduate studies in painting, Stokes also realized that teaching was an art and noble calling. In the 1970s, early in his professional career, he abandoned painting and embraced paper collage. After working with paper collages, by 1996, Stokes began to compose by means of computer. He now works exclusively by digital montage.

“I was a painter of geometric abstractions in the mid 1970s. There came a point when I began to know what the finished pieces would look like before executing them. Completing a painting thus seemed pointless. I abandoned paint for collage, a process improvisatory by nature and far less scripted than what I'd been doing. In the mid 1990s I wished to create larger pieces and expand my palette. A dear friend suggested digital composition, saying "computers love to make collages." For me there was no looking back. I'd been endeavoring to make the collages seamless, sometimes painting the edges of the paper fragments before gluing them down, even sanding the edges of thicker papers to make the boundary between one piece of paper and its neighbor less conspicuous. Photoshop obviated taking such pains. I consider my efforts with the paper collages and early digital pieces to have been cooking with leftovers, captured by means of scanning. Now I shop for fresh ingredients, armed with a digital camera in my pocket. I've come to think of the most recent work as fauxtographs, compositions that appear at first to be pictures taken of objects arranged on a ground plane before being captured by a lens. Rather, they are composed of objects that have never been in the same place at the same time until I and the software worked our will upon them. I was therefore delighted to come across this quip by Edgar Degas: "A picture is something that requires as much knavery, trickery, and deceit as the perpetration of a crime”.
The work continues to be improvisatory. I play with the ingredients and process, letting the piece in progress tell me where it wants to go while trying not to repeat myself. Please don't think that there's an interpretation I have in mind for you. I myself am trying to figure out what the pictures mean, if they mean anything at all. My hope is that you will simply enjoy the looking as much as I enjoyed the cooking.

A generous encomium: "Like many of his generation, Stokes was trained to see the canvas or sheet of paper as an arena where relationships between form, space, color, and line had to 'work' no matter what the subject. A discriminating visual intelligence has been the hallmark of his work since his first one-person show at Cordier & Ekstrom in 1986. Stokes' 'raw material' is a veritable mine of found imagery: the artifacts of culture, both high and low, from east and west. His images are like dreams in which the symbols point in two directions - toward the imagination of the artist and the history of the imagination.”   Harriet Shorr, Painter, NA

Leonard Stokes has had numerous one-person exhibits in New York City galleries, such as Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery. He has also shown in Beacon, Katonah and Purchase, NY, in Dallas, Texas and Philadeplhia, Pa. He has been in many two person and group exhibitions all over the USA. Stokes’s work is in both corporate and public collections — the Newark Museum, The Newberger Museum, The Reader’s Digest, and IBM to name a few. His teaching career included Professor Emeritus at Purchase College (SUNY) School of Art and Design, visiting professor and chair at the University of Pennsylvania 1990-1993, the Lacoste School of the Arts, Lacoste, France, The Cooper Union and Yale University.

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