Issue Illustrator | Hailey Stumpo
Each issue of Up the Staircase Quarterly features an Issue Illustrator, an artist whose work was chosen to pair with and complement the poetry of the quarter. Issue #74's artist is Hailey Stumpo.
Hailey Stumpo is a Dover-based fine artist currently pursuing a degree in studio art at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Her works have been acquired by private collectors in Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, including renowned oil painter Dr. Sandra Corpora, by whom Stumpo has been mentored for three years. You can find Hailey on Instagram @indieannaartwork and on her website.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Saturated colors, expressive marks, childlike stylizations, and philosophical themes converge in my drawings, which ponder the universe's most unanswerable questions. Each piece is a train of thought made tangible, braiding memories, curiosities, concepts, and other abstractions together into compositions overflowing with meaning. The intimacy of my work is reflected in its small scale, and its solemnity in the worn, ornate thrifted frames I trap it in. Flattened perspective, shimmering surface decoration, and continuous narrative storytelling are common features of my work. Often, I position young girls inside expansive, maze-like dreamscapes, emphasizing feelings of loss and helplessness, or awe and freedom. As a contextual anchor, excerpts from my personal journals are routinely incorporated. Metaphor and microcosm define my style.
For me, the process of creation is automatic, visceral, and both messy and meticulous. My drawings, made almost exclusively from watercolors, inks, and colored pencil pigments, begin as words, phrases, and poems before acquiring visual identities. I create within a stream of consciousness framework and typically eschew reference photos in order to establish a personal distortion and filter the world through my eyes; my pieces depict reality not as it actually is or was, but as it felt or seemed to me at a point in time. Some works are melancholic, others sentimental, but all are deeply personal and entirely alive.
My artistic calling is to create pieces that, more than just works of art, are blueprints, maps, timelines, diary entries, and notebook pages, each containing some fragment of truth in its contemplation of the nature of the universe, the passage of time, the boundaries of human imagination, and the energy that charges individual moments in a life. My drawings are not so much reflections of me as they are me; they are my mind turned inside out and put on display.
Hailey Stumpo is a Dover-based fine artist currently pursuing a degree in studio art at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Her works have been acquired by private collectors in Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, including renowned oil painter Dr. Sandra Corpora, by whom Stumpo has been mentored for three years. You can find Hailey on Instagram @indieannaartwork and on her website.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Saturated colors, expressive marks, childlike stylizations, and philosophical themes converge in my drawings, which ponder the universe's most unanswerable questions. Each piece is a train of thought made tangible, braiding memories, curiosities, concepts, and other abstractions together into compositions overflowing with meaning. The intimacy of my work is reflected in its small scale, and its solemnity in the worn, ornate thrifted frames I trap it in. Flattened perspective, shimmering surface decoration, and continuous narrative storytelling are common features of my work. Often, I position young girls inside expansive, maze-like dreamscapes, emphasizing feelings of loss and helplessness, or awe and freedom. As a contextual anchor, excerpts from my personal journals are routinely incorporated. Metaphor and microcosm define my style.
For me, the process of creation is automatic, visceral, and both messy and meticulous. My drawings, made almost exclusively from watercolors, inks, and colored pencil pigments, begin as words, phrases, and poems before acquiring visual identities. I create within a stream of consciousness framework and typically eschew reference photos in order to establish a personal distortion and filter the world through my eyes; my pieces depict reality not as it actually is or was, but as it felt or seemed to me at a point in time. Some works are melancholic, others sentimental, but all are deeply personal and entirely alive.
My artistic calling is to create pieces that, more than just works of art, are blueprints, maps, timelines, diary entries, and notebook pages, each containing some fragment of truth in its contemplation of the nature of the universe, the passage of time, the boundaries of human imagination, and the energy that charges individual moments in a life. My drawings are not so much reflections of me as they are me; they are my mind turned inside out and put on display.
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You can find Hailey Stumpo's art on the following pages of UtSQ: David Eileen | Proofs Cherry Cheesman | Things I Forget to Leave in My Purse Darren C. Demaree | Emily as Hands and Eyes and Emily as Vanity and Commerce Weston Leo Richey | Cloud Number 9 Anthony Frame | ̶P̶o̶e̶m̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶W̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ ̶D̶e̶a̶t̶h̶ ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶T̶h̶e̶ ̶S̶a̶n̶d̶m̶a̶n̶ ̶V̶i̶s̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶M̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶D̶r̶e̶a̶m̶ All My Heroes Turned Out to Be Creeps Mrityunjay Mohan | Birds Blue Birds Mervyn Seivwright | An Echoing Deduction Dean Bartoli Smith| Encounters Eliza Fixler | For better, for worse |
