Stanley Chow: Art for our time

Stanley Chow

By NICOLLETTE RAMIREZ

Stanley Chow is an artist-illustrator from Manchester whose work has been featured in the New Yorker magazine and other popular publications. His portraits of famous musicians, actors, politicians and athletes in his geometric style are immediately recognizable and iconic.

This interview is based on his personal life and practice as his subject matter has been well documented elsewhere. Here he contextualizes his work in terms of his own family, his parents, wife and children, as well as the things he personally enjoys when he’s not working. 

Stan’s parents had a chip shop in Manchester when he was growing up and he spent a lot of time, encouraged by his parents, painting and drawing. Now with his own daughters he too provides them with the tools to be creative. This means of escape from work in the chip shop became for him his passion, which he was able to parlay into a career, first illustrating for fashion publications, then for a wider audience.

As a young man growing up in Manchester Stan collected music and to this day collects vinyls and spins records in his down time. Some of the artists Stan listened to as a young man he subsequently illustrated. One of his favorite pastimes is watching football and football players have also been immortalized in Stan’s particular style.

Stan’s style has evolved over the years and this evolution has been chronicled for me personally because he first did my portrait in his fashion style for a James Bond party I hosted in the early 2000s then he designed my Beez and Honey logo for my company. Recently he did a portrait of my son Theodore Love Ramirez Matthiessen which became the basis for my son’s personal label TheoRM.WM