The Art of Stuart Gold

Born in Los Angeles, Stuart Gold studied at UC Davis with artists such as Wayne Thiebaud, Roland Peterson and Roy Deforest. In 1980, he received his masters degree from SF State University in Printmaking. Prolific in sculpture, paint, digital and design mediums, he is known for his famous TV series inspired by his father, a TV repairman in Los Angeles. Fascinated by distorted Television media, he dove into the syntax, color and vibrancy of the eye's interaction with television pixels of the time, representing them in oil and acrylic media. This endeavor yielded portraits and commercial art into images that vibrate and move the eye to another dimension. Best known are his Overlord and Hat Flutter. However, his range of artistic expression embraces the gamut of abstract to realistic to scientifically correct coelacanth sculpted creatures of the deep ocean. His deep interests in art, science, sculpture, anthropology, and musical instrument-making impacted his artistic vision, resulting in creative reliability and a strong force of movement.

Gold discovered his calling while in the peace corps, in the middle of a rain storm. He decided to do Art instead of become a doctor. He was 23 and had volunteered for the Peace Corps to work on eradication of small pox. He is credited with finding the last outbreak of smallpox in South Eastern Ethiopia, in the Kaffa province. Before his death, Stuart wrote about this discovery in chapter 7 of Eradicating Smallpox in Ethiopia: The Peace Corps, which came out the year following his death.

Reviews:
San Francisco Focus Magazine, (Feb. 1985, The Video Kid by Rebecca Burns)

Gold describes his work as 'metaphors for the distortion of reality'. The son of a former TV repairman, Gold grew up in Los Angeles, the TV capital of the planet, and from an early age was bombarded by video imagery. You couldn't even go to the bathroom without seeing TV, 'he recalls. We had dinner conversations between commercials. There were sometimes fifty TVs at a time in our garage.

Gold himself has seven TVs in his San Francisco apartment. But actually his first obsessions were primates and rockets. An artist since he was twelve, he earned a degree in primate biology at UC Davis, then went to Ethiopia with the Peace Corps. One night, during an African rainstorm, he flashed on how to finish a painting back home. From then on, art was it.

Already having studied art in college under such luminaries as Wayne Thibaud, and Roy DeForest, Gold went for his master's degree in printmaking at San Francisco State, where the TV legacy of his childhood finally caught up with him. His thesis was a series of prints satirically depicting the effects of TV on society. His facility for realistic drawing next led him to produce his unique series of environmental portraits, in which each person is set in his or her own special universe.

While figuring out how to portray the errant screen, Gold got hooked on static TV imagery.

San Francisco Art Institute, Exhibition Sight and Sound, curated by David Rubin, Feb. 1985

Stuart Gold's concern with negative subliminal effects of television has been the basis of his art since the late seventies, when he portrayed television as an altar in a series of representational etchings. In subsequent drawings and paintings, he developed a style which he calls video syntax, which resembles video wave and scrambled patterns seen on a television screen when it is malfunctioning.

Death for Dinner is a mixed media altar that comments on the degree to which violence is transmitted via television and, thus, taken for granted. The central portion of the altar consists of a television that plays taped footage, manipulated by the artist, of the 1967 shooting of a Vietnam Cong prisoner by a general in the South Vietnamese army, a scene that was viewed by Americans both on television and on newspapers and magazines.