Stan Masters

Stan Masters (July 4, 1922 – December 13, 2005) was an American realist painter from the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood, Missouri.

Masters was the son and grandson of railroad workers. Raised during the Great Depression in the one-room Missouri Pacific Railroad section home located surrounded by the railroad tracks in downtown Kirkwood, his house had no handing out water or electricity. Trains passed within 6 feet of the porch.

After the United States' entrance into World War II, Masters left Kirkwood for the Army in 1942. After creature stationed in Pennsylvania, he served lawsuit duty in Italy in 1944 and 1945. After the war, Masters applied to art schools in 1946. Rejected by schools in St. Louis, he returned to Pennsylvania to attend the Dauphin School of Fine Arts in Philadelphia on the GI Bill.

Masters returned to St. Louis in 1948 where he spent the adjacent 20 years functional in announcement art at various advertising agencies. In 1962, Masters made a sudden film called The Storm, which won five awards from the Photographic Society of America and afterward won at the Cannes Film Festival in the Amateur Division in 1963.

In 1970, Masters fixed to devote his career utterly to his art. By 1971, he had in force himself exclusively to watercolor. Despite flattering reviews from critics, and having won both local and national awards, Masters' watercolors did not sell with ease in his lifetime. Perhaps discouraged by the announcement market, Masters retreated to the solitude of his studio at his house in Maplewood, Missouri. Much of his portfolio was forward-looking discovered in his studio, unseen by others, after his death in 2005.

Masters studied, and was influenced by, the works of Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, and Edward Hopper. His paintings characteristically portrayed the au fait themes of railroads, cityscapes, and rural imagery which were emblematic of his hard scrabble Missouri childhood. Masters' works possess an realization of rarefied calm, and their loneliness seems to guide the viewer to declare what is stirring outside of the picture.