JANUARY 2017

This month's Lion Spotlight shines on 1967 Alhambra
Lion Stan Kurth, featured below in an article written by Betsy Dillard Stround for the book, Watercolor Masters and Legends.  His work can be viewed at juried exhibits, on his website, stankurth.com, and on Pinterest.

Every day Stan draws in his sketchbook, and his drawings represent the masterful way he handles line and drama. There is a subtlety about Stan’s paintings that isn’t seen in the drawings, but each is equally compelling and expresses the moodiness, the ambiguity and the skill with which he draws and paints.

In this first stage of “Orange Sunshine,” Stan fills the surface with a wet-into-wet wash of orange and red and a grayed-down yellow, leaving scattered whites. His beginning is always a random one in which he has no plan.

“Something happens to me during each process,” Stan explains. “I’ll be working on something that doesn’t work, for example, and perhaps I’ll spill something or smear something. That’s when the magic happens.”

In real life, he describes his awakening to art and God as his ride to Damascus, a metaphor for his painting life and his spiritual life.

As a child, his aunt exposed him to art, which he says, “blew me away.” But he battled with himself. “Is this viable?” he’d ask. Thus he began his college career in pre-law and describes changing to art in his last year as a “blink” experience.

“Painting is spiritual. It is personal. I ask myself, ‘Where is this coming from?’Mine is a melancholy experience,” he says broodingly, looking off into the distance. “And it is not a step-by-step procedure.”

What he has accomplished is an aesthetic feat. Unexpected lines appear to float beneath the upper surface of the paper, and because these are barely seen, his work becomes a palimpsest of all the marks, colors and shapes he has brushed, drawn and splashed into his painting. One enters his paintings, and “not knowing” is the linchpin that draws you into his mysterious surfaces and keeps you there. The odyssey the adventurer follows in his painting, he hopes, makes “not knowing” a knowable experience.

If you know of a Lion from the class of 1967 that should be recognized, please visit the Contact Us page and send a message to us with some brief details and your name and phone number.