Screening your calls the unique vision of Shawn Stucky

Written by Damien James for Art Voices Magazine

 

Chicago artist/screen-printer Shawn Stucky has been living the artists dream: He’s poor, supporting himself on the shaky ground of print advertising, never without a party, and continually creating. OK, so maybe it’s not all dreamy, but his artistic success in Chicago is in fact straight from a story book.

 

At 29 years old, the Illinois Institute of Art graduate has been commissioned to create a permanent piece for the City of Chicago’s river-front renovation project, exhibited at Loyola University Museum of Art, and has been featured at the Chicago Art Open, Around the Coyote Gallery, Flatfiles Gallery, and countless other local venues and publications. His screen-prints hang in the Iceland recording studio of Sigur Ros and have been seen in galleries from London to Rome, Brussels to Los Angeles, and New York City. He’s created art for Ring Road Records in Arkansas and several recording artists across the country, including Joe Pug. Yet he has no local representation, nor is he seeking it.

 

“It would be nice, but I’m not in a hurry,” Stucky says in his quiet and often self-effacing way.

 

His casual attitude is as real as his ambition, however. He spends time online each week looking for potential shows, occasionally finding leads for employment in the arts as well. Two months ago Stucky applied for a position as a screen-printing technician at the Royal College of Art in London. “They emailed me back “NO,” he laughs. He knew it was a long shot, but long shots never stop stucky from getting his work in front of people. He applies for anything he thinks might fit his medium and vision. “I don’t want to ever regret missing an opportunity that might have changed my life.”

 

When he’s not at his day job or looking for someplace to show his art, he’s in his home-made studio laboring. His discipline and drive are evident in the well traveled body of work he’s amassed, his screen-prints are instantly compelling; rich in metaphor and beauty, and wrapped up in the kind of visual mystery that draws people in, inspiring them to project their own stories into the art and to create instant personal connections. Stucky’s imagery is steeped in the slow probing of his subconscious, in the music he surrounds himself with while creating, and in his affection for family and friends. Some of Stucky’s most effective pieces are those that directly address the people in his life, such as Gently, Raining and Dreaming, an entirely archetypal and emotional homage to his mother and siblings, and the kind of art that seems to radiate it’s own light. Stucky often seeks to honor those he cares about with his art, and that genuine desire to honor is palpable in many of his prints, if less so obvious in his day to day personal exchanges with the world. Whereas his art is often a plain and simple and eloquent representation of his love, Stucky moves through the world like many great people, with a certain amount of friction which can simply not be ameliorated. Stucky freely admits to having trouble focusing, being led by a short attention span down many divergent paths; though when he creates, he finds himself in an element all his own, shining all his effort, talent, and concentration into the white-hot bulls-eye of his medium.

 

Despite friction, he views making art in much the same way he views being in the world: “If you love your work, it will love you back,” a philosophy one could easily apply to more than art, possibly across the spectrum of human experience. Living is clearly a work in progress, but one Stucky becomes better at each day.

 

It was only in 2006 that Stucky began screen-printing, starting with a one-day crash course at Screwball Press. “I spent months working at the studio, mainly evenings since that was the only time I could go. But since I practiced in the evening that meant there was hardly ever anyone there...Stressful since I didn’t have anyone around me to help if I had a problem. At times I would get so angry I’d rip my prints up.” Faith and months of practice paid off, however.

 

His first fully realized screen print was the product of a dream about a girl. He woke with an image in his head, went to the computer, and didn’t get up until he’d rendered a satisfactory draft of the print in Photoshop. Stucky then printed a limited edition entitled May This Be Love (courtesy of Jimi Hendrix), a striking piece later turned into a giant vinyl banner by Lollapalooza for it’s Chicago debut.

 

The screen-prints begin as multimedia collages populated by illustrations from Victorian-era books. The images range from people in repose, at work and play, to incredibly detailed horse-drawn carriages and odd sea vessels -- (each carrying specific, significant emotional/intellectual weight for Stucky—which are scanned and manipulated with Photoshop, burned onto silk screens, and then printed atop earlier screened textured backgrounds and text. Often the figures are monolithic, recalling icons from the Eastern Orthodox church, and focus on the relationship between man and woman, departures, and the movement of energy through and around those strangely antiquated yet contemporary characters which wake up in Stucky’s work, sometimes missing limbs or eyes, sometimes sprouting flowers from the places where his computer visited some violence or transformation on them.

 

Recently Stucky has changed gears, however, favoring individually hand-burnished pieces that bring him much closer to a painterly mode of making than straight-forward screen printing is able to do. “Fundamentally, nothing has changed for me. I just now find that creating works that are editions of one are more exciting, because I’m able to spend so much time on one piece and try to make it perfect, unlike printmaking, were I have an edition of 30 very similar pieces. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy printmaking as well, but there is something special about spending hours on one piece. It’s like a child you care for and nurture; eventually it grows into something beautiful.” The new works explore a darker side of the artist and his world, more nightmarish and chaotic than serene and sublime, but no less enthralling.

 

Incredibly, Stucky creates his vibrant, emotive pieces through color blind eyes. It was in the seventh grade, in McPherson, Kansas, that he first realized something was different. “My parents washed my red sweater with my white socks,” resulting in socks pink enough for everyone to distinguish as pink accept for Stucky himself. “Needless to say, I was subjected to lots of ridicule from my fellow students.” Still, it took several years and doctors to convince him that he really was color blind.

 

“Eventually I learned to accept it,” he says, “but it still sounds funny to me... An artist that is color blind is like a chef with no taste buds. It’s just backwards. I used to think it was a problem and that I wouldn’t be taken seriously as a graphic designer, let alone an artist. Now that I think about it, I believe my color blindness gives me a unique perspective. I know I see things differently than most people who view my work. I will always wonder what everyone else sees.”

 

To catch a glimpse of what Shawn Stucky sees by allowing yourself to be engaged by his work is to be welcomed into an often beautiful and strange world, one which unfolds with each new print just as the artist himself unfolds with each new day.