For Stanley Boxer (1926–2000), art making was a way of life. Throughout his career, he wrestled with the natural propensities of media and materials and the physical and historical limitations imposed by artistic forms. He was equally inventive in painting, sculpture, and drawing, striving in each for directness of expression. It was important to Boxer to maintain a strict working routine; he felt the repetition of this practice was “a lubricant,” enabling him to “drift past notions of the moment,” himself, and his self-distrust to see what would happen and make that which “doesn’t exist in physical evidence.” He understood art as a second nature, a creation separate from what a work represented, while it possessed the authority of lived experience. For this reason, he indulged his feelings of being in the world in his art without thinking of his work as being predominantly self-expressive.
