Rice, Stan

About the Artist

Stan Rice, United States, (1942-2002). The book jacket flap of Rice’s Paintings describes his paintings as “Vivid, passionate, primitive …Childlike, ironic, and darkly humorous – they attest to the original vision of a talented poet and painter.”

D. Eric Bookhardt a New Orleans art critic writing for the Weekly Gambit said of Rice: “…bold, bright and even garish concoctions that suggest the work of an untrained folk artist with a sophisticated expressionist outlook. The tone is visceral in a way that recalls the deadpan humor and word games of the old time San Francisco Bay-area beat poets, but the execution is pointedly, almost defiantly, raw. The figures and settings are almost crudely rendered, and the brilliant, sometimes gaudy colors appear as a melee of clashing polychrome tonalities. An example of no known school, they are the mental offspring of a poet who just happens to be the spouse of novelist Anne Rice.”

Stan Rice is also the author of eight collections of poetry, including Radiance of Pigs, Red to the Rind and False Prophet (published posthumously, 2003). Read his pig poems here.

Rice has been the recipient of the Edgar Allen Poe Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and a writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.