About the Artist
Stanley Patrick Stocker, a Philadelphia native, is the son of a meat cutter and a meat wrapper. A
graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, Mr. Stocker is a lawyer in Washington, DC. His
writing has appeared in the New York Times and Shooting Star Review. He lives in the Maryland suburbs
with his wife and son.
Artist's Statement
My goal is to tell stories that show how we live and that includes the struggle between our humanity and our divinity, or perhaps a better way to say it would be to say that to be human is to be both flesh and divine. We are creatures that contain nobility no matter our social status just as Zora Neale Hurston, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman showed. I seek to show how quaint is the habit of living in a house, in a body, in a marriage; how brave we are and sure, though how often wrong, misguided, and misspoken. To show how random and unexpected the kindnesses and how inevitable the cruelties that flower from the body's soil though body and soul are one. This is the essential task: to show us in all of our complexities and contradictions; to show that every human being is a unique bundle of sensibilities never before seen on the earth, unique instruments on which the various elements of the earth play such that each of us is ever and always a new thing under the sun.
