901 C Canyon Road / Santa Fe, NM 87501
928-460 2611 / stan@stanberning.com
Mr. Berning, a resident of Santa Fe since 1981, is a well known artist, author, teacher, and former gallery owner . His works have been exhibited in such diverse locations as San Francisco, Paris, and New York’s Lincoln Center. In 2005 his paintings became the focus of the film OFF THE MAP starring Joan Allen and Sam Elliott. Also in 2005 he began a year long journey up the west coast of North America. Experiences during this time became the foundation for his memoir about art, which was written over the next three years.
Evocative of the New Mexico landscape with its sweeping vistas and ever changing light, these most recent oil, egg tempera, and watercolor paintings are the result of a fifteen year process described in the entry “A Figurative Derivation”.
Artist Statement:
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