Portfolio: Temre Stanchfield

by Lynn Woods, June 29, 2009

As this year’s artist in residence at Kingston’s Trolley Museum, Temre Stanchfield is painting landscapes inspired by Kingston Point Park, located not far from the museum on the Hudson River. These pastorals, which suggest a luxuriant, if slightly disquieting, languor represent a departure for the artist. Formerly a photorealist who explored issues of gender and sexuality in her images of female and male nudes, Stanchfield has been moving toward a more painterly style. Her series of Japanese-inspired female heads, which she showed at galleries in Kingston, Beacon, and Rhinebeck in 2007 and 2008, turned conventions of the Japanese feminine ideal upside down, with their exaggerated coiffures, blurred faces, and carefully rendered accessories. Her more recent series of head studies showcases the visceral nature of paint: Images of blandly beautiful women are transformed into grotesques by the loose, luscious application of red and pink paint and erratic scraping. In one monumental study, the canvas has been turned on its side so that the head rests heavily on the ground, as if suffering from a very bad hangover.

Born and raised in Alaska, Stanchfield spent her young adult life in the Seattle area before earning an MFA at the University in Arizona in 2000. Her paintings of overweight, middle-aged, nude men, depicted as cavorting cupids, and young cowboys wearing nothing but cow masks were shown at the Pima Community Art Gallery in Tucson and in Los Angeles. In 2001, Stanchfield and her husband moved to Japan, where both taught at the Kanazawa International Design Institute, an affiliate of Parsons School of Design. After arriving in the Hudson Valley in 2007, they bought a house in Kingston, where Stanchfield paints in an attic studio and teaches art to children. Her landscapes will be shown at Donskoj & Co. in Kingston from July 4 through 25. (845) 338-8473;
www.donskoj.com. Portfolio: www.temrestanchfield.com.