Being a painter, I was born in 1951 already an antique.  After a lifetime of creating images in this post modern world I have come to champion no ism’s.  Taking to heart my eighty year old friend’s reminder that his generation made sure everything had been done, I have proceeded to do everything in each painting.  The resulting fifteen oil paintings, though inevitably stamped with my distinctive aesthetic voice, travel freely through various fields of contemporary exploration.  Accepting that the act of working in paint will result in the echo of vaguely familiar imagery from past painters has released me from the tyrannical demand for newness and, ironically, opened the process to a multitude of possibilities embodied in each individual painting.  If it has all been done before there is no territory worth defending.  One either stands on shifting sands, or swims.

Stan Berning
April 2017