I found Stacey’s work at The Drawing Center. Her statement encapsulates what I love best about being an artist:
“For four years I have been using gouache on paper to explore the possibilities of new spatial compositions, color harmonies and elaborate doodles. I work unscripted, allowing myself to be inspired by tingling sensations and funny thoughts rather than by rational ideas of what to paint.
I usually begin work by laying down some color as a wash or form. Pieces of a story appear and as these images become too candid, I must sublimate them until formal aspects of composition, color, form and line fall into place.This process is a repetitive digression until the work is humbly revealed.
If I want apples, I get kumquats. I tell myself to draw a pig, but the pig ends up looking like a mouse. No matter, because I want to be in a world without rules, a lawless state. The fun is in the optic poetry, the improvisation and the non sequiturs. Drawing plays a role as a means to developing my thoughts but I am more interested in stuff that gets stacked or goes around in circles, visual rhymes and repetitions, tight spaces and spaciousness, patterns and decorations, and any improbable arrangement of these things. An unexpected, yet anticipated, commentary or composition must come about before the piece is resolved. When the gumball drops out of the machine, I am done.”