ABSTRACT
The ‘third conversation’ serves also by way of an epilogue. At the close of his appreciative biography of Stanley published in 1991, some 30 years after Stanley’s death, Pople offered this valediction:
How is Stanley regarded thirty years afterwards? A consummate painter, surely, of the identity of things: of places as landscapes, of natural forms as still-lifes, of sitters as portraits, in these the equal of any at his unhurried best; but also a questing visionary showing forth in the quiet of his studio an odyssey chaptured into compositions which satisfy aesthetically, even if on occasion their content is disturbing, the uniqueness of each sometimes obscuring its contribution to the odyssey, and comprehensible only when the happenings of his life are known and the meaning of his words examined.
Attempts to define Stanley’s art have occasionally faltered, largely through post-modernist notions that form and pattern have priority over content. Stanley’s art lies as far outside the mainstream of modern artistic convention as does Dante’s poetry outside that of today’s academic literary criticism. 1
