Haas Center for Performing Arts Gallery (PAC 1121), Allendale Campus
May 12 - June 30, 2023
Opening Reception: Friday, May 12, 5-7pm

Hours:
Monday - 10am-5pm
Tuesday - 10am-5pm
Wednesday - 10am-5pm
Thursday - 10am-5pm
Friday - 10am-5pm

After studying photography in Baltimore, Maryland, I moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I worked as a landscape photographer using film cameras. Why did I become a painter? In 2008, finding myself at a crossroads with photo technology changing, and sensing a sharp increase in my aesthetic attraction to color, form, abstraction, and ambiguity, I began painting. Since then, I have kept an active studio practice, exploring painting on canvas and wood panels, without a conscious concern for pre-visualization of imagery and subject matter. I always paint in seclusion, never in public, or plein air, from early morning until early afternoon. Painting has become, for me, a daily disciplined practice of meditation and physical action. My method is similar to what musicians call improvisation. Spontaneous drawing and accidental shaping of oil paint with knives and sticks help the paintings emerge through a gradual buildup of surfaces. This process can take from six months to several years to finish.  

These paintings are my response to external environments where I live—the land and lakeshore encountered in West Michigan. They explore the growth and destruction of nature, my personal despair from human losses over time, and memories of places seen and internalized from travel in North America, Ireland, and France. Some painters that have been important to me are Chaim Soutine, Frank Auerbach, Asger Jorn, and Joan Mitchell, as well as my friends and mentors, painters Elaine Dalcher, Tim Fisher, Cathy Marashi, and Richard Emery Nickolson.

My intention is always to resolve these paintings while continuing to question and identify who I am as a painter, a citizen, and a mortal human being. As I continue to paint and the colors and materials change, it is the ongoing work that sustains me.

- Stanley Krohmer       www.stanleykrohmer.com

Grief Again

This painting began in 2014 as a gestural lyrical abstract pastiche of brighter shades of color, in praise of summer. It was then abandoned at my studio until a few weeks after my mother died. Three deaths that year: my friend and GVSU colleague Milt Ford, my sister-in-law Kathy and then my mother Violet in late September. Grief once again. Motherless now, and yet not used to being without the responsibility of caring for an elderly parent. Thinking I still needed to go to visit my mother at the nursing home. Then remembering, “No, she is gone.” The final marks I made on this canvas were darkly morose. Summer was over. Death and remembrance, loss and grief remained. I kept painting, more memento mori, through it all. - Stan Krohmer

Tribal

This is a very early painting that finally resolved after a year’s work of building up its surface and wondering what it would become. During this time, I was obsessed with orange, ochre, blues and cobalt teal mixtures. I was also listening to a lot of New Orleans rhythm and blues while working almost exclusively with a painting knife and a color shaper brush, applying more paint layers, waiting weeks for them to begin to dry. Then scraping, excavating to see what had become blended or solidified underneath. One day, while I was listening to Dr. John’s album Tribal in my studio, I realized that this painting was done. So, I called it Tribal and “dat was dat”. - Stan Krohmer

Visages de la Quarantaine au Michigan

Here are some ivory black gouache sketches from a series I made at home with a pallet knife during the COVID pandemic lockdown March- April, 2020. Although I was fortunate not to ever have become ill or even test positive for the virus, and even though I was able to stay safely at my home, the existential crisis, and fear, the isolation I was experiencing became the catalyst for my daily work on paper. Anxious, grotesque faces became my focus, although I also tried to make some other gouache paintings during this period of lockdown. This series has over fifty sketches. These were all completed quickly, each within five minutes, and I usually made three or four sketches per day. I titled the series in French because my wife and I had made future plans to return to France, before the pandemic came. Now it was one of our goals, something to hope for, beyond simply surviving the insidious menace of the Coronavirus pandemic that kept me away from oil painting at my studio in R.O.I Design, Grand Rapids. - Stan Krohmer

Location

May 12, 2023 - June 30, 2023

Haas Center for Performing Arts Gallery (PAC 1121)
Haas Center for Performing Arts, Allendale Campus
1 Campus Dr.
Allendale, MI 49401

Contact

For special accommodation, please call:
(616) 331-3638

For exhibition details and media inquires, please email:
Joel Zwart, Curator of Exhibitions
[email protected]

For learning and engagement opportunities, please email:
[email protected]