Ilene Gienger-Stanfield

Ilene Gienger-Stanfield was born and raised in Klamath County, Oregon, on her parents’ ranch in the open range and farmland near the Klamath/Modoc Indian reservation. She was drawing from an early age — a sixth-grade moment copying a Santa picture in Chiloquin is her first memory of being excited by what a mark could do. She went on to Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where she earned her fine arts degree, then continued her education studying pastel with Harley Brown — the most significant influence on her work — and oil with Carolyn Anderson.

She works from a studio in the hills of Southern Oregon near Phoenix, where she holds weekly figurative sessions and teaches private lessons and national workshops. Her subject is the human figure, and her method is to paint shapes rather than objects. She often does not know what she is painting until those shapes cohere into a recognizable subject — a woman at a ball, two figures leaning toward each other, a person caught in a private moment. “Start with truth, then manipulate it,” she has said.

In Full Moon, The artist employs bold contrasts between warm peach-toned flesh and cool lavender shadows, allowing thick impasto strokes to model the figure's musculature and create tactile surface variation across the canvas. The composition positions the female figure centrally against near-total black, with her raised arms and tilted head establishing a vertical thrust that the dark ground refuses to soften or contextualize. What strikes as problematic is the work's reliance on conventional femininity—the soft ribbon, the graceful pose—to convey introspection, the artist hasn't yet pushed beyond representing female interiority through traditional visual codes.

In Belle of the Ball, The artist applies oil paint with loose, directional brushstrokes that dissolve form at the edges—particularly visible in the orange fabric and pink background—while maintaining sharp focus on the subject's contemplative face. Composition positions the figure in three-quarter view against a soft lavender-to-blue ground, with the warm ochre and blue of an unseen chair anchoring her turned posture and creating spatial recession through color temperature shift. The floral-patterned dress contrasts sharply with the painterly abstraction surrounding it, creating an odd tension: the more meticulously rendered garment paradoxically feels less real than the loosely handled flesh and drapery, undermining conventional portrait hierarchy.