There Were Giants and Smaller Men in the Earth

We can catalogue the backlist titles of James Everett Stanley’s solo exhibitions: There Were Giants in the Earth in Those Days, Salt of the Earth, and The Garden. Or consider even the titles, forgetting the paintings themselves: You And I Are Brothers, Be My Eyes and Ears, or My Only Brother, One of His Many Sons. Stanley offers a fair amount of sentimentalism, but slides a fair piece of self-conscious irony underneath to preserve a larger nostalgia.

Stanley pushes old tropes of American iconography, some works seemingly embracing the theme, but others, if not rejecting the dialogue, maintaining a standoffish position. The silent commentary—his subjects’ watery eyes aren’t much more than a confrontational stare in some paintings—would ask if we’ve reached a new period of history: capitalism as contemporary imperialism. But Stanley’s protest, if it is one, is the painterly antithesis to direct, violent confrontation. The opposite of a Code Pink protester, hands smeared with blood-red paint, clashing with Condoleezza Rice before she testified on policy in the Middle East.

Stanley was born in 1975 in Waltham, Massachusetts, a city eight miles east of Boston on the Charles River. He studied fine arts at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and further honed his painterly chops with the MFA program at Columbia University. He participated in a summer session at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in a secluded neck of the woods that lends itself ideally toward cutting slices of Americana out for one’s canvasses.

The subject of Scrub Pine stands assertively in the picture, proudly decked out in weaponry and clutching an object that might be best used to bludgeon someone. Whether the man’s leather pouches hold weapons for hunting the native animals on his family’s land or to kill an insurgent enemy remains unclear. Are we standing in the Plains or in Iraq? Is that spare outfit army-issued or just something that hangs in this man’s sparse and practical closet? The eyes in Stanley’s works are mournful, haughty, angry, proud, or entirely unreadable, the rest of the face obscured by cotton cloths. Whichever mood the subject projects, the eyes—more so than stance—draw the viewer’s attention. In either scenario, the painting elicits two opposing ideas about the role of landscape. A clear, arid landscape might be a doctored and far-stretching property that a John Smibert or Benjamin West could have dropped in from the background of an Old World landowner’s portrait, but the land may also signify much more in these paintings. Bucketrider Gallery’s curatorial copy postulates that Stanley’s subjects are “born of the ground on which they so tentatively, but proudly, stand.” Other works suggest another perspective: that the land might belong to another people entirely—Stanley wafts in with such confusion the latent politicism. But these paintings do not call to mind the all-American everyday guy’s triumph of historical genre scenes. If the arrival of a new world order is upon them, our subjects seem to have arrived in it armed, yet unprepared.