Biography

Drawing from her experiences as a woman and an artist, M. Louise Stanley engages humor in her work in order to poke fun at life’s idiosyncrasies. Through her satiric figuration, Stanley creates allegories of the contemporary circumstance and male-female relationships. Though her paintings often include autobiographical content, Stanley looks beyond the immediate, casting universal fears, fantasies, obsessions, and taboos into a lighthearted narrative that makes even the worst demons palatable.

Stanley’s fascination with drawing and painting began at a young age, when she first encountered classical art at the Huntington Library in Southern California. Her father, a watercolorist, encouraged her interests, taking Stanley on numerous painting excursions in which she encountered the work of American regionalists such as Reginald Marsh, Grant Wood, and Thomas Hart Benton. In 1965, the artist came to the Bay Area and enrolled in the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC), where she earned her B.F.A. and M.F.A. in 1967 and 1969, respectively. The environment at CCAC during the 1960s was eclectic and unconventional, a place where departure from mainstream art trends was accepted. While studying at CCAC, Stanley joined a group of women artists who met at the Mountain View cemetery in Oakland to paint. It was here that Stanley began to invent narratives that involved elements from her own life and experiences. In her youth, Stanley had wanted to “paint images that people would gag and cry over” but after witnessing two women laughing hysterically at her work, Stanley shifted her focus.1 Inspired by the women’s liberation movement, and among the first string of artists in the Bay Area to agitate for women’s rights 1971, Stanley adopted issues of sex, romance, and gender relations in her work. Since that time, the artist has added political commentary, art historical references, and most recently classical mythology to her repertoire. But even as her imagery has changed, she has continued to engage humor in her work in a manner that is playful, witty, and often scathingly accurate.

In All That Glitters is not Gold (1988) Stanley uses comedy to discuss the dichotomies of male-female relationships. Inspired loosely by the joke “all that glitters is not gold, said the camel urinating in the moonlight” (which was published in Mad Magazine and subsequently adorned the artist’s wall during junior high), this painting illustrates Stanley’s notion of the fundamental differences between the sexes.2 A curious woman peers around a tree to sneak a peek at her boyfriend, who is relieving himself. The scene pokes fun at the persistent curiosity of women, illustrating what the artist describes as “the formidable obstacle of men who do not emote and women who are always trying to collect more data in hopes of better understanding men and their relationships.”3

Painted with splashy brushstrokes and bright colors, All That Glitters in not Gold is typical of Stanley’s exuberant style. Influenced by the European Renaissance paintings that she has encountered on her many trips abroad, Stanley pays careful attention to light, shadow, and flesh tones—yet her figures are unquestionably contemporary and often retain a cartoonish appearance. The figures in this work, particularly that of the woman, are caricatures. Typical of Stanley’s paintings, their features are elongated and the planes of their faces are dramatically accentuated. These manipulations add to the narrative quality of the piece by presenting people as representatives of emotions and expressions rather than of actual individuals.

Marked by their extravagant comedic effect, the paintings of M. Louise Stanley deliver humorous meditations on the absurdities of the human condition with remarkable success. Although her protagonists are often women exploring their personal fears and fantasies, her paintings tend to take on a universal quality, allowing the viewer to easily identify with their familiar and laughable situations. —L.W.

1. Artist’s statement, 1998.
2. M. Louise Stanley, letter to Susan Landauer, 11 January 2000.
3. Stanley, conversation with the author, 19 March 2004.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)


M. Louise Stanley was born in Charleston, West Virginia. She received her B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts. She has had solo exhibitions at the SFMOMA rental gallery (1999); Haines Gallery (1993; 1991); Rena Bransten (1986); and the Berkeley Art Museum (1978). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Triton Museum of Art, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, the Palo Alto Cultural Center, the Oakland Museum of California and SFMOMA. Stanley’s work is represented in the collections of the de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara, SFMOMA, the Museum of Art and History at the McPherson Center in Santa Cruz, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Triton Museum of Art. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2000)

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