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     Stanley Bly is an American, Midwestern, artist work generally depicts subjects who reference mythology, art history, and blue-collared sweat. He tends to place them in a surreal limbo, next to flat spaces, and chalkboard images or paintings of the work he's referencing in a print like or drawn fashion.  The chaotic nature of the "chalkboard," or "drawing" next to the traditionally painted imagery, creates a scene that is both academic, and asymmetrically destructive. The romantic compositions present the work as a theatrical narrative and challenge the viewer to find more than what is immediate.

 

     

 

     Stanley has shown his work in various galleries in Chicago, the University of Illinois, as well as the Illinois State Museum, has the painting "The Stabled Raft" in the Illinois State Museum's Legacy Collection, and has had multiple publications of his work.

 

 

     One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

 

Eliot, T.S., “Philip Massinger,” The Sacred Wood, New York: Bartleby.com, 2000.

 

 

Thanks for looking,

Stanley Bly

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