Birches at Mt. Layfette Campground, White Mountains
Artists & Performing Arts
Stapleton Kearns
Oil Painter

Stapleton Kearns
Derry, NH
www.stapletonkearnsgallery.com
Range: $2,000 to $20,000
The Banks Gallery, Portsmouth, N.H., Guild of Boston Artists, Boston, Mass., Meridian Galleries, Nantucket, Mass.
Stream on Robert Frost Farm

Iconoclast and rebel may seem strange words to describe a painter of impressionist landscapes, but they suit Stapleton Kearns. He is a man of contrasts. A classically trained artist, he begins on location, then completes each canvas in a large Victorian studio he designed at his antiques-filled home. But he came of age in the 60s. Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, and Issac Albéniz, an early 20th century Spanish composer, are his musical muses, coloring the studio’s air. “I am where traditional painting and rock and roll meet,” says Kearns. “I want to make powerful paintings. I think about musicians and how their attitude enters my work yet I do what an artist of this era is not supposed to do. The only radical thing left in 1960 was to be traditional. The definition of contemporary art is anything other than what I do.”

Born in Minnesota, he spent years feeling out-of-synch with the modern approach taught in art schools until landing at the Fenway Studios in Boston. There he met R.H. Ives Gammell, a veteran of World War I who studied with the noted American impressionist William Paxton. Ives Gammell carried forward the earlier tradition of The Boston School, emphasizing technique, the work of the masters, and the importance of seeing colors and shapes accurately. In the manner of the 19th century, he taught Kearns first to draw with charcoal from plaster casts before moving on to paint. Later, in Rockport, Mass., Kearns learned from others in the Cape Ann fraternity of plein air painters who absorbed everything in the air around them.

Outdoors in his favorite places—New England, Nantucket, West Texas, Italy and France—Kearns searches for views he calls “power spots.” He looks for shapes and colors in the landscape and for places from which you can pull paintings forever, he says. “I don’t copy nature. It’s a buffet from which I take what I like and move things around.” His oils are true colors, straight from the tube, or close to it, although sometimes, as in music, he drops the key. “Like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn’s versions of the same song, the art is in the interpretation,” he explains.

There is a completeness to his landscapes. They have warmth and a fullness that he says comes from solving the puzzle of what makes a place distinct. A member of the Guild of Boston Artists, Kearns is a past-president of the Rockport Art Association. His paintings have been chosen twice for the Biennial Show at the National Academy of Design in New York.