James Stanford

Light and Life in Las Vegas

James Stanford’s dad packed up the household in the 1940s, and drove from Texas to Las Vegas to coach high school football. The older sons donned shoulder pads, but the youngest, a strapping figure who looks like he’d be comfortable guiding a horse on the high plains, had broader ideas for himself and Las Vegas. An ambassador for this western City of Lights, James helms Smallworks Press when not creating the coruscating mandalas that culminated in Shimmering Zen at 2018’s Asian Art in London. I visited him and wife Lynn (a Mighty Muse!) in their stomping grounds where I toured the Neon Museum, Yayoi Kusama’s Inifinity Room and wandered through a mesquite grove in the middle of town.

Gwynned Vitello: Am I off-base in describing you as someone who is compelled to seek harmony, but wants to go about it outside of proscribed boundaries?

Jim Stanford: My older brother was a terrific artist, a cartoonist, and that certainly impressed me when I was a small child. From the time I was 16, I knew I wanted to be an artist, and I drew all the time. I sort of knew the difference between drawing what was in front of me from the stored set of symbols that most children have when they draw. My brother did that, as well, but he had done enough life drawing at art school to draw figures off the top of his head.

Where you at that stage at 16?

I wanted to be able to do that, as well, and, at 16, I also discovered a book called Vision in Motion by the Bauhaus-influenced artist László Moholy-Nagy. I learned about Dada, Futurism, all the isms of the early twentieth century, about Picasso, Lee and Matisse; and one thing I realized they all had in common was that they were academically trained. I made up my mind to go to college and study art and learn to paint in an academic way. I realized that after they did that, they threw it all away.