Larry Stanton
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Larry Stanton, June 21, 1947 – October 18, 1984) A Manhattan based portratist whose work was admired by David Hockney, Henry Geldzahler, Ellsworth Kelly, and others. He was a handsome and charismatic gay man who lived in Greenwich Village in a small, apartment which had been his fathers until the latter retired to Florida in 1970.
EARLY LIFE
Larry was born in Rockville Center, L. I. but his father bought a 200 acre dairy farm in Delhi, New York in 1948 and moved the family there. The farm did not turn out to be an economic success and brought lots of stress into the family’s life. Painting was always Larry’s primary interest, fortified by the conviction that he was descended from the English painter, Sir Thomas Lawrence, on his father’s side.
FORMAL TRAINING
In 1965 Larry moved to New York City. He attended Cooper Union for one semester in 1966 and then in 1967, he moved to Los Angeles, CA to live with Arthur Lambert. In 1968 he attended Art Center College of Design for a year where he studied painting and drawing.
FIRST SHOW
Returning to NYC to take over his father’s apartment, he went to Europe for two months at the end of 1968 but in January 1969 he received a scholarship at the New School of Social Research to study printmaking. A show at the Gotham Gallery in NYC followed in January 1970. He was subsequently awarded a Tiffany Foundation Grant.
TRAVELS 1970’S
The period up to 1979 included a lot of traveling – to London to see David Hockney whom he had met while living in Los Angeles, as well as to Italy, Morocco, France, and even East Africa.
BREAKDOWN
In 1979 his life changed, however. The death of his Mother combined with increasing alcohol addiction resulted in a breakdown for which he had to be hospitalized. It was 1981 before he fully recovered, but when he emerged, free of alcohol and cigarettes, he found a new passion for painting. The faces of his family and friends and the boys he met became the primary focus of his work.
RECOVERY, EXHIBITIONS, AND DEATH
In 1983 he had a show of portraits at the Holly Solomon Gallery on West Broadway in Soho. In 1984 he showed at the Aaron Berman Gallery, at PS 1 in Queens, NY, a space devoted to promising new artists, and at the Magic Gallery in NYC. After he died, his collected works were shown at the Charles Cowles Gallery on Broadway, NYC in 1987.
HIS PORTRAITS
He worked in many mediums, crayon, pen, pencil, charcoal, and paint. His crayon drawings have a richness of color where the background is blocked in that give them a great intensity. His portraits display an emotional resonance that go beyond the creation of a mere likeness. Subjects include Hockney, Geldzahler, Brad Gooch, Dennis Cooper, Charles Ludlum, Tim Dlugos, Duncan Tucker, and other friends and family, as well as various young men with whom he came into contact.
Stanton died of AIDS in October, 1984, at the age of 37.
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
Some of Stanton's work has been collected in a book called Larry Stanton, Painting and Drawing (ISBN 0-942642-29-5), with writing by David Hockney, Henry Geldzahler, Tim Dlugos, Julia Mayo, and Arthur Lambert, Jr., from Twelvetrees Press, 1986.
