News Archive

By Rhiannon Price

A book, an exhibition and the writer-curator who saw the potential for both in an unlikely suburban home crowded with extraordinary works of art....

They are Winthrop Professor Ted Snell, his monograph Stan Hopewell: Facing the Stars , and the upcoming exhibition Stan Hopewell: God is Love at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.

These three tell the remarkable story of yet another threesome: a love triangle connecting Stan, his wife Joyce, and his art.

"This is a love story. It is the story of Stan Hopewell and his beloved wife Joyce, a couple whose lives became intertwined during World War II and remained fused together during 62 years of marriage," says Ted in his introduction to Stan Hopewell: Facing the Stars .

In 2007, Ted and his wife Mary Moore accompanied Robin McClellan, then the American Consul General, to see the work of an amateur artist who was the father-in-law of her driver Tony Scurry. "The house was literally filled to the brim with oil paintings," Ted said. "You could hardly move between the canvases and collages."

Stan, a retired electrician, filled his house with paintings during the three years in which Joyce was ill. "He made a deal with God, that he would paint his love of God while Joyce stayed alive," Ted said.  Joyce had also been an amateur artist but Stan, who was 80 years old when he started painting, had never before picked up a brush.

"God moves my hand, I do not have control," Stan told Professor Snell.

Joyce died in 2006 and Stan immediately stopped painting. He also stopped writing in the huge journal that has helped Ted to write the book about this exceptional man, his wife, his life, his art and his deal with God.

"Stan slipped quite quickly into Alzheimer's," Ted said. "But we had some lively conversations in 2007 and 2008 before that happened".

The paintings document not only Stan's love of God, but his love of Joyce, his time in the Air Force in the Middle East and England during WWII and his life as a family man in Perth after the war, where his and Joyce's lives intersected with many well-known local people including the Governor, Sir Charles Gairdner and a young Alan Bond.

The University bought one of Stan's paintings last year.  The other 25 or so for the exhibition are on loan from Stan and Joyce's family.  They represent about one quarter of the total works he created during this period.

At one end of the exhibition will be a 7.5 metre by two-metre photograph of Stan and Joyce's back room, which was cluttered with paintings.

"His work deserves the space and respect of an art gallery, but they will have that extra richness when viewed in the environment in which Stan worked and kept them," Ted said.

The Gallery's campus partner for the exhibition is the Geriatric Medicine unit (Medicine and Pharmacology) and Winthrop Professor Leon Flicker.

"I've been talking to Leon about late onset creativity, which is often seen in Alzheimer's patients," Ted said.  "There is a body of literature about this phenomenon in which the neural pathways that once stopped people taking risks are changed, and patients often feel less restricted and uninhibited, with art sometimes the result."

Stan Hopewell: Facing the Stars , published by UWA Publishing, will be launched at the opening of the exhibition on Friday 11 October and is open to the public from 12 October - 14 December.