Stanley Bielen is primarily a still life painter, who began as a figurative painter.
“Still life provided the basis for my study of painting. It suited my temperament,” said Bielen. “I like the studio very much. I like being alone with my work, and still life is perfect for a hermit type of person, which I think I have some of those traits.
The subject matter of my work has stayed remarkably the same over the decades. I’ve used simple floral arrangements with ceramic objects. I use them as a starting point for painting. As someone who is still interested in realism, I like this balance between suggesting or arriving at an illusion. There’s always this balance between evidence of means that reveals the beauty of your materials - their sensuous qualities and all those things that I find so compelling.
One of the concerns in this work is atmospheric space. I work from natural light from a skylight, so it changes over time. If you were to remove the objects off the shelf, which is my normal setup in my studio where I arrange things, 50 percent of the subject would still remain.
What’s in there is the specific light and a specific atmosphere, and this changes throughout the year. So even if I were to repaint this several times, it would look different. The winter light and atmosphere is different; it's moodier. The difference between trompe-l'oeil is that it mimics the atmosphere in the room you’re in, but an atmospheric painting always retains the atmosphere of the room in which it was painted.”
