Jeff Stauder
Bio
Jeff Stauder was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of a radical Maoist Harvard junior professor and a loving FDR Democrat. Raised by a fierce single mother, as a child he roamed freely in the woodlands of Eastern Connecticut.
Stauder received his BA in Art from the University of California at Santa Cruz and his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he won the 1996 Dana Pond Painting Award. He moved to New York City, where he painted, bartended, and created the Artists Theoretical Racing Circuit, a collaborative conceptual art project.
Resorting to teaching, Stauder moved to Western Massachusetts in 2008, where he indulged his true nature, reveling in an imagistic historicism inspired by his favorite old and modern masters. His work has been exhibited widely in New England, including a solo exhibition at the University of Massachusetts. In 2022, he was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Grant in Painting.
A joyful misanthrope with a deep knowledge of painting, Stauder loves rock & roll, art history, and cats. He is trying to create one truly great picture before he dies.
Mythic West Statement
As a boy, I was captivated by the stories of wild west gunslingers and outlaws. Mythic West is my mash-up of that troubled tradition with another: the classical myths that have dominated Western visual culture for hundreds of years.
This absurd conflation reveals something about the function of myths, which can be defined as stories, but also as misrepresentations. In a similar way, painting has always been a game of representation and misrepresentation.
The subjects of this series, primarily George Custer, Jesse James, and John Wesley Hardin, can be seen as objectively terrible people, but their mythologies allow them to function in divergent ways. Historical figures become symbols rather than people, as real as the blood-red putti who watch over them here.
My interests in painting mirror this indeterminate ground. Using a framework mined from long-forgotten etchings and old west photographs, I alternatively pursue representation and abstraction, structure and gesture, illusion and flatness.
Pure color is applied both formally and metaphorically. I pit the figures against the flatness of the picture plane, enacting a battle in which I repeatedly render and flatten forms until I am satisfied that I have done both, and neither.
