An Invitation to Discover for Yourself: Just What is it About Justin Stone’s Art

“The bottom line is: Do you have a reaction?” This is something Justin Stone said to me years ago when showing me one of his paintings.

And that is what makes me decide to buy a painting — is there anything there to KEEP interesting me? Many paintings are beautiful and skillfully done, but what will make you look again and again at a painting? What makes you want a painting in your house (where you will see it day after day)?

When it has something there that you don’t understand yet — like a koan (Zen puzzle with no “right” answer) — that is when.

Justin’s paintings have this effect on me. I don’t like all of them — some I don’t like at all — but to no paintings other than his am I so drawn. I love his use of color — mismatching that works! I love his use of texture (secret techniques) that look like sand or small rocks mixed into the paint. I love his compositions — some so spare. But he is doing more than producing beautiful paintings — which many great artists have done (Picasso, Mogdiliani, Miro, Cezanne) — he is embedding koans. In studying his paintings, there is a puzzle there that my mind is working on. His paintings are fascinating to me — absorb my full attention when I stare at them. I see so many different aspects and new ones all the time in the same painting. There are layers and layers and levels and levels.

Over the years, I have watched my attraction to the same paintings change — when I have understood something on some level, it is time to take the painting down and put it into storage for awhile. Taking another one out that had been stored may cause me to see it in a totally new way. Others that I was not so crazy about (that I had seen years before in Justin’s house) I have then been drawn to buying. As I evolve, my relationship with Justin’s paintings evolves.

I invite you to browse through the paintings in his new artbook, Tentatively Forever: Paintings by Justin F. Stone. If one particularly appeals to you, leave the page open on the coffee table, so your mind can study it, mull it, when you happen to pass by during the day.

There is something in these paintings — far beyond color, technique, composition. What is there cannot be conveyed in words. I invite you to find out what it is.

The bottom line is: Do you have a reaction?