Bill Stoneham: Terrifying Paintings

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The world of art is very thin, emotional, expressive. For many, it is no longer a secret that the picture is able to convey not only the artistic intent of the creator, but also his state of mind, the inner world at the time of the creation of the work. One of the most striking illustrations of this statement is Bill Stoneham's painting The Hands Resist Him.

Bill Stoneham's biography

Very little is known about the author of the picture, which gives ground for imagination and drawing up the image of the creator. American artist Bill Stoneham was born in 1947. After the birth, his mother, surnamed Miller (this is the only thing known about her), left the boy in an orphanage, where he spent the first nine months of his life. He was then adopted by the average American Stoneham family.

How Bill's relationship with his parents developed, how his school years passed and the formation as an artist began - a mystery shrouded in darkness. And there is plenty of darkness in the history of Stoneham and his paintings. Who is he, the real Bill Stoneham, whose paintingsdrawn in the spirit of surrealism, is a person trying to express his pain or just a showman?

Scandal picture

The artist became truly famous after creating the painting The Hands Resist Him, which translates as "Hands resist him." The picture was painted in 1972. And in the same year it was presented at the exhibition. The canvas caused tears in visitors, especially sensitive ones even fainted.

The owner of the Los Angeles Time edition became the first owner of the picture. Some time after the purchase of the canvas, he suddenly died. Creepy painting by Bill Stoneham has passed to the next owner, actor John Marley. He died two months later. The actor's family blames the canvas for Marley's death and throws it into a landfill.

In the same place, in a landfill, an American family finds her and brings her to their house. That same night, the youngest daughter begins to have nightmares and claims that the children in the picture are fighting. This went on for some time, and the father of the family decides to install a video camera in the room with the picture, which reacts to movement. The camera turns off several times, but the recording does not show any movement. The family puts The Hands Resist Him up for sale on the eBay online auction site. The description of the lot is accompanied by its dubious history and a warning of the potential danger to the future buyer.

The story of Bill Stoneham's painting gains eerie fame and is overgrown with legends. Site administrators receive letters with complaints about feeling unwell and having nightmares after coming into contact with the painting. She becomes sopublicized that the number of page views with this lot reaches thirty thousand. Eventually the Bill Stoneham painting was sold to Kim Smith. He posted it in his art gallery.

Description of the picture

The idea for creating the canvas was a photograph of the artist himself, where he is captured at the age of five next to his sister. Upon discovering this photo at his parents' home, Stoneham completes it with surreal details. The picture is drawn in the spirit of the forties. The colors give the impression of a yellowed photo card.

The author depicted on it looks not like a child, but a fifty-year-old man. The doll standing next to him evokes horror with empty eye sockets. She looks like she's alive, but the articulations on her arms betray an artificiality in her. With a bright sunny day, which gives shadows on the faces of the characters in the picture, the darkness behind the door contrasts. What is inside the house, the viewer can only guess. But we can clearly see the children's hands stretching and resting against the glass of the door.

Psychological interpretation of the picture

Bill Stoneham himself describes the content of the picture as follows: “The doll is a guide to the world of dreams. The glass door separates the real world from the fantasy world. Children's hands are unrealized opportunities and lives. We can only guess what it is - the world of dreams and fantasies of a five-year-old kid.

If you look at the artist's life story through the prism of this canvas, you can interpret itcontent. For a person, the most important, fundamental for later life are the first months after birth. Bill Stoneham, whose paintings are striking in their abstraction from the real world, spent this time in a shelter. When the child was supposed to be in the arms of the mother, he lay alone in his crib. This is the deepest trauma of a lonely baby, which the artist perfectly conveyed. Having a family makes him feel alienated. His sister seems to be inanimate for him, because he was not taught close relationships in the first months of life. Surrealism is an attempt to escape from the real world, cold and not accepting, into the world of fantasy - also not the most rosy.

The story of the painting: mysticism or a successful PR move?

If you look at the picture without taking into account its terrible aura, you can see just a canvas that conveys the pain of a little man. The reaction of sensitive people to the plot of the picture is simply explained - it resonated with their childhood trauma. The second owner of The Hands Resist Him has died at the age of 77. The description of the lot on an online auction made it possible to sell the painting not for the starting $199, but for $1,025.

Years later, Bill Stoneham created paintings that continued in dynamics the plot of the work “Hands Resist Him”. In each subsequent canvas, the author grew older, and the doll more and more took on the features of a living girl. Analyzing these facts, the picture seems less and less mystical and more and more like just a successful PR stunt.

The fate of the picture and the author today

To date, the painting is still in the Kim Smith Gallery. Apparently, in anticipation of the moment when the scandalous picture of Bill Stoneham reaches the entire maximum price. The artist himself continues to live in California and paint surreal canvases, as well as digital images for publications.

Bill Stoneham, whose paintings became popular thanks to The Hands Resist Him, has become something of a legend and secured a comfortable old age.