Stan painting #1

FILM OF STAN PAINTING ON FILM, BOULDER, 2002

Somehow, over the course of 13 years, I only managed to shoot of a couple of 16mm rolls of him (though I have hours and hours of video). In hindsight, I was simply just too self-conscious about reversing the tables on him, so to speak, artistically. It was implicitly understood, I believe, that all the videos I shot of him were to be either for my ‘home movies’ or an archival record of a special event, e.g., the salons - and not an art as such (though he surely would not have objected to that). This afternoon summer scene is very much how he worked (when painting directly on film) in the last several years - at various cafes and sports bars (usually indoors) on Pearl Street in Boulder (Boulder Blues and Pearls and…), amidst his taco salads, root beer floats, or Irish coffees, able to completely engage in conversation and continue working unabated. The dental tools and other hardware, the bottles of paints and markers, and the cores of film or bags of loops would then be wrapped up and put away, and we would usually try to catch a 3:00 matinee (his reward). He was a man of familiar routine. He liked to paint outside of his office, he often said, so as not to be unmoored from the world, from language - something he feared from the dark legacy of the lives of many of the Abstract Expressionists…