Biography

Fred Stonehouse combines the styles of Latin American folk art, Renaissance frescoes, and vernacular sign painting with themes from symbolist and surrealist art and literature and his Catholic heritage to craft a personal iconography that is at once eccentric, paradoxical, and mysterious. According to art historian Eleanor Heartney, Stonehouse is preoccupied “with traditions that celebrate the irrational,” which lead to “unsettling juxtapositions of the believable and fanciful.”1 The artist’s provocative fusion of fragmented images floating on richly painted canvases result in ambiguous postmodern enigmas that are both dynamic and puzzling to behold.

Stonehouse was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1960 and reared in the Roman Catholic tradition by a blue-collar family that recognized his drawing talents at a young age. Encouraged by members of his family, many of whom were hobby painters, Stonehouse became fascinated with the illustrated encyclopedias, religious calendars, and picture bibles that his parents kept at home. After a brief foray into auto mechanics during high school, Stonehouse decided to pursue a B.F.A. at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where he graduated in 1982. During frequent visits to Chicago, Stonehouse was introduced to the unconventional artistic styles of H. C. Westermann and the Hairy Who, as well as the art of Philip Guston, whose expressive figural paintings had a profound impact on Stonehouse. Shortly thereafter, the young artist discovered the surrealist literature of Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, and Jorge Luis Borges, and the mystical allegories of Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo and French symbolist artist Odilon Redon. Among this heady mix of influences, Stonehouse combines the biblical tales of his Catholic upbringing with a lifelong interest in the occult and psychic phenomena.

In Mantequilla, which translates to the English word “butter,” Stonehouse humorously explores the magical process of alchemy—as it applies to the mundane transformation of cream into butter. While the phrase receto oculto, which hovers on the surface of the painting, may refer to the “secret recipe” used by Wisconsin dairy farmers, it also alludes to the process of making gold, which symbolizes illumination and salvation in alchemy. Near the center of the canvas is a cigar-smoking, apple-headed Catholic monk, perhaps referring to the biblical mystery of creation and the divine expulsion of Adam and Eve from Garden of Eden. The monk holds a leashed black crow—a bird invested with mystical powers, especially among alchemists who view it as a symbol of sublimation and the solitary detachment one experiences when striving for spiritual fulfillment.2 The glowing skull, a common emblem for the mortality of man, is also of great importance in alchemy, where it is seen as the holder of life and thought, and therefore used as a receptacle in the process of transmutation.3

Stonehouse also views the process of art making as an alchemic conversion, whereby “a base material (paint) … undergoes a magical transformation into art.”4 And he amusingly notes that our desire to sort out the complicated symbolism of his painting suggests its absurdity, as well as our longing to transform it into something meaningful. At the heart of Mantequilla, according to Stonehouse, “is the desire for magic and love of the absurd in an age where, sadly, magic is lacking and the absurd has worked its way onto the stage of war and politics.”5 —A.W.

1. Eleanor Heartney, “The Fantastic Realism of Fred Stonehouse,” Fred Stonehouse, exh. cat. (Madison, Wisc.: Madison Art Center, 1992), 11.
2. J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1995), 6, 8.
3. Ibid, 299.
4. Artist’s statement, 2003.
5. Ibid.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Born in Milwaukee in 1960, Fred Stonehouse received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin in 1982. His work has been shown in numerous galleries as well as group exhibitions at the Arkansas Arts Center, the Madison Art Center, Wisconsin, and the Cincinnati Art Center. His work was featured in Contemporary Devotion at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2001. His work is in the collections of the Madison Art Center, Wisconsin and Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin. This would be the first piece by Stonehouse to enter SJMA’s permanent collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2003)

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