Lacey Stinson

I am a working studio painter, contraption maker, and an adjunct professor at a local university. Like being gay, being artist is there from birth, which is why artists never really retire. --- I grew up having strong interests in drawing, painting, and science, with particular love for night skies. After my BFA, I spent several decades painting plein air landscapes, earning an MFA in 1997. During this time I participated in 60+ juried shows, winning numerous awards. Eventually, my irrepressible love for abstraction, surrealism, and science instigated in 2008 work on designing and illustrating five poetry chapbooks for a friend. This activity rejuvenated my original vision for painting from high school that has since evolved into my current multi-year project. I have taught art on occasions, and am currently an adjunct professor at an historically Black university. Relatively recently I learned two things about myself that clarify my long unresolved struggle with drive, time management and social interactions. The first discovery in 1996 was that I had unknowingly been experiencing brain seizures from a head injury for the previous 20 years; and while seeking treatment for the head injury 2 years ago, I discovered I am on the autistic spectrum. Proper medical treatment, along with the intellectual tools I developed to deal with these things, compliment my late commitment to bring my thoughts and ideas to life in a multi-year project that resurrects my first love in painting. --- "Small Worlds - the Planetary Landscapes" is a set of oil paintings involving night scenes on exoplanets in some unknown galaxy. In these paintings, the optical effects of atmosphere and dim light create ambiguous, surreal forms: the peripheral glow of clusters of stars near and far; indecipherable geology; structures that may be living, or the eroded artifacts of long extinct civilizations. These elements subtly connect the imagery with our species' questionable relationship to our own planet. The bareness of the cosmos in which we live, punctuated in all probability by such vistas in the vast empty stretches of space and the abyss of unfathomable time, evoke thoughts on evolution, the complexity of ecosystems, and the prowess and failures of technology, altogether a beautiful and deliberate indictment of both reasoned and frivolous human ideals and goals at home confounded by the ignorance of political incompetence and greed. We meet in the middle between known extremes, where material wonder of being springs unceasing, even as milestones of memory fade to oblivion. The impermanence of meaning does not excuse the waste of our global irresponsibility. --- A starry-eyed teenager wanders the broad halls of a science museum filled with rare bits of knowledge, rotunda displays, and a small painting of a galaxy by Chesley Bonestell, a jewel among this wonderful collection of jewels, given the touch of a visionary master, and a welcome seed of inspiration for a young mind. --- I also draw impulsive and impassioned portraits, but have yet to make these the focus of my painted work.