About DeVon Stanfield

DeVon was born in Hollywood , California in 1968 eight months after the tragic death of his father, a young, ambitious film producer. His mother, a singer, left Hollywood and relocated her family to the Bay Area where she remarried. After some time the family moved again to a small rural town near Park City, Utah.

There, DeVon excelled in classical and jazz music, receiving a college scholarship in Music. However, after commercial success of screen-printing fine art designs combined with dada poetry on T-shirts for rock concerts and specialty stores, he changed his degree to Visual Arts. During De Von’s academic career in the visual arts at the University of Utah, he gained the attention of the Dean of Fine Arts, who sponsored him to customize an innovative Bachelor’s degree called Arts Promotion. This degree ensured his commercial career through specific business and marketing courses that led to an internship at the curator’s office of the Supreme Court of the United States. He pursued extensive studies in art history and language in Europe, where he became fluent in Spanish, French, and Italian.

Upon graduation, DeVon collaborated with other artists, promoting their work through managing and owning galleries in Beverly Hills, Laguna Beach, Carmel, San Francisco, Park City, and Aspen. He also lectured in Academies of Art in Russia, France, Italy, China, and South America.

DeVon’s preferred medium is mixed media of originals layered with collage, acrylic paint, diamond dust, swarovski crystals, sealed under a thick layer of glossy resin. He layers and collages pages from magazines, calendars, and fine art books while cross pollinating references from pop culture, high fashion, psychology, history, Jungian concepts of mythology, archetypes, new age, music, space, technology, and mass advertising. Creating requires influences, and De Von’s work is greatly influenced by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jackson Pollock. From Duchamp to Damien Hirst, these artists have consistently challenged the idea that meaning ascribed to objects is permanently fixed.

All cultural artifacts are open to reappropriation. The best examples of this kind of creative work are often marked by a reframing of the original narrative, which produces a fresh perspective on both the source material and the context in which it first existed. De Von’s mash-up form is described as nothing less than an evolution in our cultural literacy.

Consuming images: appropriation, abstraction, and seriality exploring Warhol’s formal strategies and groundbreaking use of pre-existing photographic sources. De Von’s work is thought of as a method of quotation, citation and commentary; as a form of pastiche, parody or homage. His remix can be seen as a transformative work of creativity that forms part of the fabric of our wider cultural environment, like a flashlight into the tip of the iceberg, illuminating that which is submerged below, the very soul of pop art. At a deeper level he explores the concepts of the hero’s journey as set forth by Joseph Campbell and unconscious archetypes of the psyche as explained by Carl Jung, a visual language of dreams.