About Jim Stoner

Jim Stoner is a multi-media/disciplinary artist, skilled facilitator, and award-winning educator.  He is a veteran of the United States Army.  Jim has more than 28 years teaching and developing programs centered on lifting up marginalized people.  He was a featured poet in The Pacific Review and has published other poems in Cultural Logic, The Awakenings Review, Educational Studies, Torrid Literature Journal, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, The Wisconsin Review, Parenthesis Journal, Fjords Review, and in the poetry anthology Silent Voices. His artwork and poetry have been published in Jesus the Imagination: A Journal of Spiritual Revolution, where his work is featured on the back cover and inside.  He has published several artworks in the journal Into the Flesh.  More recently, his artworks can be found on the front and back covers of Parousia Magazine, Issue 11.  Jim is currently writing a book on Justice, Forgiveness, and Mercy with his sister, Peggy Stoner, a social psychologist, at Life University.  He has also written many trainings, blogs, and presented at several forums and conferences.

Jim has an undergraduate degree in philosophy, a master's in creative writing, and a master's in liberal studies. For more than a decade, he was Senior Lecturer of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  He is currently seeking a master's in clinical mental health counseling from Walden University. Jim is the founder of The Healing Arts Blog. He is very interested in the relationship(s) between our intuition, imagination, artistic creation, insight, and healing.

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My art comes from deep within my soul and is unflinchingly authentic and honest.  Art-making is a result of my curiosity and is a mysterious operation of the imagination, a self-expression, perhaps a catharsis. Along with an artwork, I often join my artworks with prose and poetry--marrying word and imagery to deepen and complicate the various subjects I explore in my work.

I try to create sublime and beautiful affects using oil pastels, pastels, chalks, markers, and pencils using color expressively and symbolically.   My palette is uniquely mine, the product of my colorblindness, and the way I perceive and paint the world.  

There is no single tradition that defines my work, though French and American Impressionism, Expressivism, Realism, and Surrealism can be found my work.  Intellectually, Pragmatism, Deconstructionism, and Post-modernism are expressed in my work. Some of my artistic influences are Vermeer, Claude Monet, van Gogh, Lucian Freud, Kandinsky, Picasso, Matisse, Rubens, Leonid Afremov, Gustav Klimt, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, and Munch.