Art Review, Sacramento Bee, An Experiment with ‘video imagery’ by Ellen Schlesinger who compared Stuart Gold’s technique to that of Georges Seurat:
“Like Georges Seurat, (1859-1891) the painter generally credited as being the father of pointilism, Gold is searching in his recent work, for a formula for optical painting. His technique, like Seurat’s, involves breaking down colors into their constituent hues, transferring these on the canvas as tiny brush strokes or dots. While Seurat’s mixture of dots tried to re-create color as it is seen in nature, Gold’s use of the technique results in mimicking the skewed patterns one sees on an out-of-kilter TV.”
Review:
San Francisco Focus Magazine, (Feb. 1985, The Video Kid by Rebecca Burns):
Gold describes his work as 'metaphors for the distortion of reality'. The son of a former TV repairman, Gold grew up in Los Angeles, the TV capital of the planet, and from an early age was bombarded by video imagery. "You couldn't even go to the bathroom without seeing TV,'"he recalls. "We had dinner conversations between commercials. There were sometimes fifty TVs at a time in our garage." Gold himself has seven TVs in his San Francisco apartment. But actually his first obsessions were primates and rockets. An artist since he was twelve, he earned a degree in primate biology at UC Davis, then went to Ethiopia with the Peace Corps. One night, during an African rainstorm, he flashed on how to finish a painting back home. From then on, art was it. Already having studied art in college under such luminaries as Wayne Thibaud, and Roy DeForest, Gold went for his master's degree in printmaking at San Francisco State, where the TV legacy of his childhood finally caught up with him. His thesis was a series of prints satirically depicting the effects of TV on society. His facility for realistic drawing next led him to produce his unique series of environmental portraits, in which each person is set in his or her own special universe. While figuring out how to portray the errant screen, Gold got hooked on static TV imagery.
Review:
San Francisco Art Institute, Exhibition Sight and Sound, curated by David Rubin, Feb. 1985:
Stuart Gold's concern with negative subliminal effects of television has been the basis of his art since the late seventies, when he portrayed television as an altar in a series of representational etchings. In subsequent drawings and paintings, he developed a style which he calls "video syntax", which resembles video wave and scrambled patterns seen on a television screen when it is malfunctioning. "Death for Dinner" is a mixed media altar that comments on the degree to which violence is transmitted via television and, thus, taken for granted. The central portion of the altar consists of a television that plays taped footage, manipulated by the artist, of the 1967 shooting of a Vietnam Cong prisoner by a general in the South Vietnamese army, a scene that was viewed by Americans both on television and on newspapers and magazines.