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 house located in the midst of the railroad tracks in downtown Kirkwood, his house had no dealing 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 instinctive stationed in Pennsylvania, he served court case 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 next-door 20 years energetic in poster art at various advertising agencies. In 1962, Masters made a rapid film called The Storm, which won five awards from the Photographic Society of America and as a consequence won at the Cannes Film Festival in the Amateur Division in 1963.
In 1970, Masters approved to devote his career categorically to his art. By 1971, he had dynamic himself exclusively to watercolor. Despite deferential reviews from critics, and having won both local and national awards, Masters’ watercolors did not sell well in his lifetime. Perhaps discouraged by the personal ad market, Masters retreated to the solitude of his studio at his home in Maplewood, Missouri. Much of his portfolio was highly developed 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 aware themes of railroads, cityscapes, and rural imagery which were emblematic of his difficult scrabble Missouri childhood. Masters’ works possess an completion of profound calm, and their loneliness seems to guide the viewer to believe to be what is occurring outside of the picture.
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