South End-based artist Tom Stocker remembers the moment his career took off. In the mid 80s, Fidelity Investments commissioned him to create an oriental rug painting for their Boston headquarters.
"Nobody else was doing them at the time," Stocker said recently. "It was a new thing, and there was instant demand."
Edward
Johnson II, then CEO of Fidelity, loved the paintings so much that he
ended up buying two more before recommending Stocker to one of his
friends, the CEO of Wellington Management. Soon, everyone in the city
was coming to Stocker to get one of his paintings.
"I
was really quite busy," he said. Stocker, now 82, is planning on
retiring after an illustrious 60-year career. After experiencing medical
issues over the years, the artist decided to "pair down" and retire
"full-scale" when his lease ends at SoWa Studios on Harrison Avenue next
spring. But don't expect him to pack away his paint brushes for good.
"I'll
have something set up at home where I can do things one at a time
instead of having two or three things going at the same time," he said.
Born
in Boston, Stocker became interested in art as a child through reading
the "funny papers" with his father. Following a brief stint in
California, Stocker returned to Boston, where he majored in Russian
language at the School of Museum of Fine Arts. After graduating, Stocker
ran Emerald City Antiques, a small trinket store in the South End.
“There’d
be mountains of Victorian furniture waiting to be picked up in the
South End,” he said. People in the 60’s were constantly throwing things
out, so I started collecting.”
Once
the recession in the 80s’ hit, he closed the store and became a
full-time artist. In 2011, he opened up his studio at SoWa. Since then,
things have changed.
“Just
seven years ago, the Ink Block was just a bunch of vacant buildings and
wholesale bakeries,” he said. But then everything was swept away, and
they built all these high-rises, but people have less wall space to put
up art.”
And if they
have art hanging up in their home? The current trend in the neighborhood
is to have a lot more “contemporary art than historical art. “Even if
they live in a Victorian building,” he said.
Though
trending or not, sales have been hard to come by. “They say artists are
the canary in the coal mine," he said. "As soon as there's a hint in
the downturn in the economy, people stop buying art. It's like boom!
curtain down.”
Still,
he keeps his head high. All around his studio, hundreds of paintings
depicting Mondrian tiles, oriental rugs, and celebrities rendered in
pop-art style surrounded him.
"I enjoy doing a variety of things," he said.
"I often wonder how other people are doing the same subject matter over and over."
He's
been working on his latest piece, "MacArthur Park," a surrealistic
landscape that brings Donna Summer's "MacArthur Park" to life. It'll
join a collection of works inspired by songs, including The Marx
Brothers’ “Lydia The Tattooed Lady” and Cher's "Bang Bang."
"I'm having fun with this one," he said.
"Who's ever heard of a cake floating in a lake?
Later, he mused about his next painting, could do something with Dolly Parton," he said.
