About DeVon Stanfield
DeVon
was
born
in
Hollywood
,
California in 1968 eight months
after the tragic death of his father, a young, ambitious film
producer. His mother, a singer, left Hollywood and relocated
her family to the Bay Area where she remarried. After some
time the family moved again to a small rural town near Park
City, Utah.
There, DeVon excelled in classical and jazz
music, receiving a college scholarship in Music. However,
after commercial success of screen-printing fine art designs
combined with dada poetry on T-shirts for rock concerts
and specialty stores, he changed his degree to Visual Arts.
During De Von’s academic career in the visual arts at the
University of Utah, he gained the attention of the Dean of
Fine Arts, who sponsored him to customize an innovative
Bachelor’s degree called Arts Promotion. This degree
ensured his commercial career through specific business
and marketing courses that led to an internship at the
curator’s office of the Supreme Court of the United States.
He pursued extensive studies in art history and language
in Europe, where he became fluent in Spanish, French,
and Italian.
Upon graduation, DeVon collaborated with
other artists, promoting their work through managing and
owning galleries in Beverly Hills, Laguna Beach, Carmel,
San Francisco, Park City, and Aspen. He also lectured
in Academies of Art in Russia, France, Italy, China, and
South America.
DeVon’s preferred medium is mixed media of originals
layered with collage, acrylic paint, diamond dust, swarovski
crystals, sealed under a thick layer of glossy resin. He layers
and collages pages from magazines, calendars, and fine art
books while cross pollinating references from pop culture,
high fashion, psychology, history, Jungian concepts of
mythology, archetypes, new age, music, space, technology,
and mass advertising. Creating requires influences, and
De Von’s work is greatly influenced by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, Robert
Rauschenberg, and Jackson Pollock. From Duchamp to
Damien Hirst, these artists have consistently challenged the
idea that meaning ascribed to objects is permanently fixed.
All cultural artifacts are open to reappropriation. The best
examples of this kind of creative work are often marked by
a reframing of the original narrative, which produces a fresh
perspective on both the source material and the context in
which it first existed.
De Von’s mash-up form is described as nothing less than
an evolution in our cultural literacy.
Consuming images:
appropriation, abstraction, and seriality exploring Warhol’s
formal strategies and groundbreaking use of pre-existing
photographic sources. De Von’s work is thought of as a
method of quotation, citation and commentary; as a form
of pastiche, parody or homage. His remix can be seen as
a transformative work of creativity that forms part of the fabric of our wider cultural environment, like a flashlight
into the tip of the iceberg, illuminating that which is
submerged below, the very soul of pop art. At a deeper
level he explores the concepts of the hero’s journey as set
forth by Joseph Campbell and unconscious archetypes of
the psyche as explained by Carl Jung, a visual language of
dreams.
"It's my way to make a difference in the world. To tell people to wake up and live their life as if it was their own heroic story."
- DeVon Stanfield