Nothing Is Hiding

As you might imagine, I see a lot of art shows in the course of doing my job. I figure that since this time last year, I've seen something like 250 exhibits — not counting the informal efforts in restaurants and coffee shops that I encounter in everyday life. It may be an exaggeration to say that this puts me in a unique position, as there are surely at least a handful of others who see as much or more than I do, but it does give me a special perspective on the Mile High art scene and art scenes in general.

One thing I've noticed is that the quality of a presentation is independent of funding or facility size. There are well-financed and finely appointed places, like the Arvada Center, that almost never have anything worth seeing, and then there are marginally supported and minimally adequate spaces, such as the Singer Gallery at the Mizel Arts & Culture Center, where you can invariably count on being wowed.

What makes the Singer a reliable source of inspiration is its visionary director, Simon Zalkind, who demonstrates how one person with little help — and, thankfully, little interference from the Mizel's bureaucracy — can make a big contribution to the cultural life of a city. The Singer's fall season kicked off with a spectacular Komar and Melamid show, American Dreams, and now there's a worthy followup: Nothing Is Hiding, a solo devoted to William Stockman's paintings and drawings from the past two years.

A decade ago, Stockman was a household name among Denver artists, and just about everyone interested in the contemporary scene here considered him to be one of the most talented players around. But then he left town for a few years and had trouble getting by. Now he's back, and his efforts are just as poetically composed as ever.

Born in Summit, New Jersey, in 1965, Stockman came out west to study at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he received his BFA in 1989. From the start, he worked with representational imagery, though sometimes it was (and still is) hard to tell exactly what he was representing. This makes sense, because CU was a center for contemporary figuration at the time, with artists such as Frank Sampson, Ken Iwamasa, Jerry Kunkel and Kay Miller on the faculty. Miller, an expressionist, was particularly important to Stockman and clearly influenced his early work. But Stockman's mature work, which he began a dozen years ago, doesn't show that influence — leading me to observe that Miller apparently taught Stockman how not to paint.

Stockman moved to Denver and joined the Pirate art cooperative a few years later, in 1994. From there, his rise was meteoric. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that he went directly from the alternative space to the Denver Art Museum, since Dianne Vanderlip, founder of the museum's Modern and Contemporary department, actually bought a Stockman from Pirate! (Those were the days, eh?) Stockman left Pirate in 1997 and began exhibiting at some of the city's top galleries, including Grant, Rule and Ron Judish, as well as various institutions around the area.

In 2000, Stockman impetuously split town, moving to Philadelphia and then San Antonio before returning to Denver in 2002. This map-hopping had a serious impact on his art, and aside from a public commission for a painting at the Red Rocks Park visitors' center, he spent almost no time in the studio. "This wasn't a deliberate choice," he says, adding that he fell on hard times while he and his wife, Stephanie, were moving around. "Art sort of fell by the wayside while we were struggling to survive."

He got back on track in 2006 and began to produce the pieces currently on view in Nothing is Hiding. This newer work marks a shift in his approach, if not his subject matter: incongruous figures doing incomprehensible things. Previously, Stockman had laid out his drawings — enigmatic scenes often anchored by nudes — with little detail while fully fleshing out his paintings, old-masterish landscapes in dark, muted colors. For his newer work, the monumental paintings have been brought more closely in line with his signature drawings. In fact, each one is directly based on a specific drawing. In addition, Nothing Is Hiding also includes an entire exhibit's worth of the drawings themselves, though none that served as studies for these paintings.