Fred Stonehouse Exhibition, Falling Waters, Reviewed in Shepherd Express

*To view the original article on the Shepherd Express website, please click HERE

Fred Stonehouse Evades Easy Categories

BY SHANE MCADAMS MAY 11, 2022

Fred Stonehouse PATCH, Acrylic on Canvas, 48 x 60”

On an imaginary spectrum from pure abstraction to crisp representation, I often wonder which side possesses the edge in revealing the private realms of the artist. On one hand, an intuitive composition of formal marks is the deepest and most interior language imaginable, but on the other hand, it sometimes is too much of an interpretive inkblot. While objective subject matter tends to force the terms, it also has the potential to burrow into spaces with more specificity … even if the specificity leads back to uncertainty.

This is a rhetorical consideration, and the answer is “both,” and “it depends.” Nevertheless, it seemed a helpful framework to place in front of the work in Fred Stonehouse’s current exhibition, “Falling Waters,” at Tory Folliard Gallery on view through May 28. At least it did for me in the wake of a night of weird dreaming. Stonehouse’s work teems with detail and specificity. Its superficial resolution and directness almost seem to spurn any sort of abstract interpretation. Even the most uninitiated viewer would refrain from referring to any of his cast of tightly rendered objects and characters as “abstract.” Every piece of content is identifiable if not nameable. From a butterfly, a snake, a sparrow, and a frog in Lost Creek Falls, to a tiger and a trout in Catch, the viewer’s left brain doesn’t have to do too much work finding its bearings. However, where, say, a ‘50s era Willem de Kooning seduces viewers with abstract arrangements of color, and encourages more concrete language,, Stonehouse’s work goes in the opposite direction.

In his work Patch, which features a bear-headed human figure clutching a whole watermelon, and stoically peering and salivating at a nearby cobra coiled around its own half melon, we naturally want to piece together a narrative. Butterflies flutter behind the central action and a waterfall gurgles in the deeper background. Is this mythology, symbolism, surrealism, or confessional? Time with the work starts to tell us more, but also less.

With similar suggestiveness, Next presents a figure donning a skeleton costume with butterfly wings, holding a large pear. The centered and foregrounded figure cowers awkwardly against a theatrical moonlit ring of waterfalls. It’s a bizarre and eerie scenario, evoking the nightmarish Sissy Spacek prom queen scene in the film Carrie, with his tears of blood gathering his brow. Both are drenched in wet shame in an otherwise ideal setting. The theatricality of the painting is further advanced by its repurposed vintage frame which functions, as it does in others, as a high-relief proscenium. From stage to stage as it were, eccentric detail to eccentric detail, the psychic residue builds. Any progress toward clarity founders. One slowly stops reading the work and instead builds a vague picture of total interiority that gets consistently more dreamlike.

You know when you have a technicolor nightmare about your high school English teacher, dressed like Marie Antoinette, chasing you with a 5th edition copy of Norton’s Anthology of English Literature, around a pool, at night, that might have been your grandmother’s, but is bottomless and lava, that you describe to a good friend with all the detail that woke you sweating at 2 a.m. … and they’re left totally puzzled? You try to give them more details, but it doesn’t help. They only get bored. Of course, they’d get it if only they could trace your dream inventory into your limbic system with you. But alas they can’t. Given this, Fred Stonehouse’s paintings might be as close as one can get to inhabiting a single kaleidoscopic interior subconscious. Not in one work. Not in two, but across many, in a hiccupping chain of irrational interior reflections. Even though the content may be identifiable in Stonehouse’s paintings, it eventually coalesces into a cloud of general strangeness that leaves the images behind, to linger abstractly, like a fever dream … or an abstract painting in reverse.

Fred Stonehouse NEXT acrylic on wood, 48 x 24”

Artist Project Series Featured on Milwaukee PBS

Milwaukee's Tory Folliard Gallery is located in the Historic Third Ward. Owner Tory Folliard talks about their latest series called the "Artist Project Serie...

Beasts of the Painted World

To read this article on Urban Milwaukee, please click HERE.

Beasts of the Painted World

The painters in Tory Folliard’s group show capture a natural world filled with strange creatures.

Mythic Menageries Exhibit. Photo taken October 23rd, 2019 by Catherine Jozwik.

The Tory Folliard Gallery’s current exhibition, Mythic Menageries, features 11 local, regional and international artists whose works capture the duality of the natural world, as a magical place filled with fabulous colors and imagination, but also with dark psychological, environmental, and political undertones.

On display through November 23, the exhibit includes, paintings, sculptures, and other works by Christina Bothwell, Mark Chatterly, El Gato Chimney, Laurie Hogan, Flora Langlois, Michael Noland, Anne Siems, Aniela Sobieski, Fred Stonehouse, Tom Uttech, and Robin Whiteman.

Siems, Langlois and Sobieski portray their female subjects in harmony with and empowered by nature, living in utopian forests with animals as spirit guides. Sobieski’s departure from traditional portraiture illustrates birds and clouds painted on women’s faces, perhaps to suggest lofty goals and aspirations. Noland’s bold gouache-on-paper works highlight animals highly symbolic to many cultures, such as the lion and the owl.

Mythic Menageries showcases several paintings by celebrated Saukville artist Tom Uttech, whose current retrospective exhibit Into the Woods opened at theMuseum of Wisconsin Art October 12. In his meditative paintings, Uttech embraces the remote beauty of North Woods landscapes in Wisconsin and Canada, which he’s spent significant time exploring. Like many other Mythic Menageries works, the paintings explore how changes to natural habitats effect animal and plant species. In one of Uttech’s large-scale paintings, a figure with a deer head and a human body hugs its knees, perhaps in desperation.

Chatterly’s “Big Blue Dog” sculpture, a 70-inch canine with impossibly long forelegs, stands sentry in a corner near the windows while another small dog sculpture sits next to it. Is the canine fulfilling his “watchdog” duties, protecting the gallery’s works?

Like his colleague Fred Stonehouse, Milan, Italy resident El Gato Chimney’s surrealist paintings focus on weird winged beast/human hybrids. While Stonehouse sets his canvas paintings against black backgrounds and uses ornate wooden frames found in antique shops, Chimney’s watercolor and gouache paintings on paper are lighter colored and reminiscent of book illustrations. Whiteman’s four small porcelain ceramic sculptures also consist of half-human, half-animal figures. For example, ”Peccaries” depicts a headless woman with pigs in place of feet. Bothwell’s three colored cast glass figures of fish and a squirrel with acorns, also incorporate unusual materials like old toys and doll parts.

“The thread connecting all of these artists is undeniable, but it is their differences and uniquely individual visions that are the strength of this group,” writes Stonehouse in the exhibit statement. “Their common interest in the expressive and conceptual efficacy of animals as a subject links their works together, but the highly internalized content and personal richness of their imaginations are evidence of the continued relevance of animals and the natural world as worthwhile territory for the artists to explore.”

Mythic Menageries Exhibit. Photos taken October 23rd, 2019 by Catherine Jozwik.