An Intimate Conversation with Katie Anne Stone at the Art Alliance

February’s featured artist at the Art Alliance is Katie Anne Stone, a Red Bank area native and emerging artist who lives her art everyday. Katie has been “doing art all her life” and focuses on a small-scale representational style that links her work from image to image.

 Art is storytelling for Katie and her work tells stories without words. She views her art as a language with multiple meanings that evoke different emotions from different people. It’s a private conversation  between the viewer and the art. That conversational approach to art is why she works on such a small scale and with such small formats. The smaller formats allow for a much more intimate connection between the art and the viewer. With “most of my paintings, only one person at a time can get into it, view it, have a conversation with it” commented Katie. I find that “painting is really intimate” and “provides an immediate response” both when I’m creating it and when the viewer is viewing it.

That small format, language driven approach to art allows for the creation of pieces that not only contribute to a linked conversation across time and space, but that also stand alone. A single piece has the ability  to tell different stories to different people in different places at different times.

 The language of Stone’s art is image based and yet ignores the conventions of specific reference points such as the human figure, an animal or a tree. 

“When I paint a girl, I want it to look like a girl but I don’t want it to look like a specific girl,” she said. "It's an idea of what a girl looks like as opposed to what her actual proportions are. I never, ever paint from a reference.”

 Concern with image and reference points comes out of her technical training at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. “It was very conceptual, highly technical, but conceptual” and I felt it was important to begin to reclaim the image Katie said. Using multiple mediums of oil, graphite and encaustic helps her build that style of conceptual imagery. Degrees in both painting and clay also enable Katie to conceptualize her work in very different ways. “They inform each other” and I am able to have a “kind of conversation with it” (the clay) that can influence my painting. 

Working with clay as a teacher at Thompson Park enables Katie to live her art and connect to the community. “Clay is my job. I get to work with people everyday who are so talented and know their stuff. These are amazing artists who I learn something new from all the time." Art, art making facilities and top-notch artists are readily accessible to the community right in Thompson Park where area artists are employed and provide lessons and advice to any resident interested in  art she told the Red Bank-Shrewsbury Patch.

Creating and placing her art in the context of Red Bank and the greater Monmouth County community was an intentional decision. Katie Anne Stone grew up in River Plaza , graduated from Middletown South and trained in Philadelphia. When it was time to make a decision on where to create, she chose the Red Bank area feeling that art here is more accessible. There is a tighter connection here between the artist and audience  than in many places more known for an art scene, and that was a critical reason for locating back home according to Katie. 

Like many of the area’s more famous artists and musicians with Monmouth County roots, Katie is choosing to intentionally place her art within the community she grew up in. Her paintings and drawings are opening a new chapter in the storied history of arts and music at the Jersey Shore.

Katie’s work is on display in the windows of the Red Bank through Feb. 22. The gallery is open every Tuesday through Saturday from 1 to 4pm and features the work of other alliance artists who are also jury selected.