Robert Stackhouse
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Robert Stackhouse
Biography
Born: Bronxville, New York, 1942
Resides: Florida
Although he is known primarily as a sculptor, Robert Stackhouse is also a prolific painter and printmaker. His images and structures frequently have the transcendental quality of things long dead rising to a new and higher form. A ship’s skeleton from the bottom of the sea may take on cathedral-like characteristics in a gallery space or the open air. Archetypal creatures such as snakes or whales also inhabit his work.
Stackhouse received his B.A. from the University of South Florida at Tampa in 1965 and completed his M.A. at the University of Maryland at College Park in 1967.
“I arrive at my themes intuitively; I never made the effort to link ships and serpents with the image of a Viking serpent-boat. The link happened as I worked. For about a year, there have been no new images. I’ve come to the end of that evolution…I make sculptures to give myself something to paint…I think of them as ideas or as questions, not just as records of things that I built.”
– Robert Stackhouse –
Resides: Florida
Although he is known primarily as a sculptor, Robert Stackhouse is also a prolific painter and printmaker. His images and structures frequently have the transcendental quality of things long dead rising to a new and higher form. A ship’s skeleton from the bottom of the sea may take on cathedral-like characteristics in a gallery space or the open air. Archetypal creatures such as snakes or whales also inhabit his work.
Stackhouse received his B.A. from the University of South Florida at Tampa in 1965 and completed his M.A. at the University of Maryland at College Park in 1967.
“I arrive at my themes intuitively; I never made the effort to link ships and serpents with the image of a Viking serpent-boat. The link happened as I worked. For about a year, there have been no new images. I’ve come to the end of that evolution…I make sculptures to give myself something to paint…I think of them as ideas or as questions, not just as records of things that I built.”
– Robert Stackhouse –
Artist Statement
Ruby Lawrence, 1995
The coiled crimson snake of Ruby Lawrence is an image seen in Stackhouse’s work since the mid-eighties. While the serpent touches a deeply ingrained fear in us, it is hard not to be drawn to this elegant, richly textured image, to go past the initial, involuntary recoil, and see its simple, quiet beauty.
Adrift, 1996
Adrift is not so much a specific vessel as a way to convey the essence of concrete types of vessel forms, or embody important parts deep within our memory. The enclosing volumetric nature also intentionally alludes to the coffin form. His images and structures frequently have the transcendental quality of things long dead rising to a new and higher form. A ship’s skeleton from the bottom of the sea may take on cathedral-like characteristics in a gallery space or the open air.
“Adrift is printed on black paper which adds to the ship’s (the Queen Mary is the vessel depicted) ominous presence; water sloughs off its bow as it punches out of the gloom into the viewer’s space in a way that it would not if the underlying black were a printed surface.”
– excerpt from Robert Stackhouse: Editions Archives –
The coiled crimson snake of Ruby Lawrence is an image seen in Stackhouse’s work since the mid-eighties. While the serpent touches a deeply ingrained fear in us, it is hard not to be drawn to this elegant, richly textured image, to go past the initial, involuntary recoil, and see its simple, quiet beauty.
Adrift, 1996
Adrift is not so much a specific vessel as a way to convey the essence of concrete types of vessel forms, or embody important parts deep within our memory. The enclosing volumetric nature also intentionally alludes to the coffin form. His images and structures frequently have the transcendental quality of things long dead rising to a new and higher form. A ship’s skeleton from the bottom of the sea may take on cathedral-like characteristics in a gallery space or the open air.
“Adrift is printed on black paper which adds to the ship’s (the Queen Mary is the vessel depicted) ominous presence; water sloughs off its bow as it punches out of the gloom into the viewer’s space in a way that it would not if the underlying black were a printed surface.”
– excerpt from Robert Stackhouse: Editions Archives –