Artist Q & A: Ian Stone

For his inaugural solo exhibition in Vancouver, Montreal based artist Ian Stone talks to us about the attraction to realism, his use of everyday objects in symbolizing aspects of gender, and history's heavy role in shaping contemporary perceptions and expectations of queer bodies and lives.
A Seat at the Table opens at Bau-Xi Vancouver's Upper Gallery on February 7 and runs through February 21, 2026.

Ian Stone, We were together, I forgot the rest. Oil on linen, 40 x 30 inches, sold.

1. What initially drew you to high realism as a painting form? Do you think realism creates a different kind of intimacy between the painting and the viewer, particularly when dealing with difficult histories?

My relationship to realism comes from a long-standing obsession with rendering. As a child, I was driven to copy things exactly—to reproduce what I saw as faithfully as possible. There was satisfaction in that precision, in the sense of accomplishment that came from making something look “right.” But it was also about control. In retrospect, probably too much control.

That impulse has always been tied to my experience of my own sexuality. Growing up in a world where I felt I had very little control—where being myself felt risky or impossible—drawing and painting became places where control was absolute. The more ordered and exact the image, the more grounded and capable I felt within it. Over time, that discipline evolved. While my earlier work leaned toward strict photorealism, I now think of what I do as a painterly realism—still precise, but more willing to reveal its construction.

When dealing with difficult or violent histories, realism becomes a way of inviting the viewer in rather than pushing them away. There’s a kind of seduction in technique. Realism can charm, attract, and hold attention before the subject reveals itself fully. If I can draw someone in through surface and craft, then they’re more likely to stay—with the title, with the references, and with the questions the work is asking.

Many people respond viscerally to realism. I’m aware of that, and I use it deliberately. The technique opens the door. Once the viewer steps inside, the work can begin to operate at another register—asking them to sit with histories, ideas, and contradictions they may not have expected when they first stopped to look.

Ian Stone, Discipline. Oil on linen, 16 x 12 inches, sold.


2. While your work draws from historical persecution, it resonates strongly with the present moment. How do you see these histories echoing in contemporary queer life?

The echo isn’t only in overt acts of violence, but in the persistence of the structures that made that violence possible. Many of the ideas that justified historical persecution—rigid gender roles, moral correction, the policing of bodies and desire—were never dismantled, only softened or temporarily displaced. They continue to surface in how masculinity is defined, how femininity is controlled, and how queer lives are expected to conform, disappear, or be legible on someone else’s terms.

What feels especially present now is the return of these frameworks under new disguises: nostalgia for “traditional” roles, moralized language around gender and the body, and renewed attempts to regulate intimacy, reproduction, and domestic life. These are not new ideas; they are repetitions. The work looks back not to draw equivalence, but to show continuity—to trace how systems of correction and exclusion endure even as their language shifts.

In contemporary queer life, this often manifests less as spectacle than as pressure: pressure to behave, to harden, to simplify identity, or to fit into narrow definitions of visibility and acceptance. The still lifes I make hold these pressures quietly. They ask how much of queer life has always existed in the domestic, the ornamental, the contemplative—and why those spaces remain undervalued or feminized.

By bringing these histories into the present, I’m not suggesting that we are living in the past, but that the past is still active. The work insists that what we call progress is fragile, and that attention, memory, and vigilance remain necessary. These histories echo not because they were unresolved, but because they were never fully confronted.

3. How do you construct your still-life arrangements? Are they physically staged in the studio, digitally composed, or built through memory and reference?

For the most part, the still lifes are physically staged and photographed in the studio. Objects are arranged, lit, and shot directly, often over multiple sessions. These images are then collaged from numerous photographs, allowing me to build a composition slowly, adjusting relationships between objects while maintaining a grounded sense of physical presence. When figures appear, they are always photographed from life.

For this body of work, I also incorporated AI-generated imagery specifically for the fire paintings. Fire is difficult to stage safely or control in the studio, and using AI allowed me to construct flames that could be studied, isolated, and held still—treated as objects rather than events. These images function as reference material rather than finished pictures, and are integrated into the paintings through the same slow, deliberate process as the rest of the work.

Memory plays a role as well, particularly in how objects are chosen and grouped, but the paintings themselves are rooted in looking: at things in front of me, at photographs made specifically for the work, and at images built through accumulation rather than invention. The goal is always to maintain a sense of physical specificity, even when the source material is assembled from multiple places or technologies.

4. How do you arrive at your decisions regarding your palette? Does working with historically loaded symbols like fire, flowers, and butterflies affect it?

For me, the palette is determined at the moment I shoot the images. I control the lighting in the studio very deliberately, and that lighting decision establishes the color relationships long before the painting begins. In that sense, the palette is not something I invent afterward; it’s embedded in the conditions of looking I set from the start.

While the symbols I work with carry historical weight, I try not to assign color symbolically. Fire, flowers, and butterflies don’t dictate the palette so much as they respond to it. Their meanings emerge through context, surface, and proximity rather than through coded color choices. This allows the work to resist illustration and remain grounded in observation.

That said, lighting does more than establish color—it sets temperature, mood, and intimacy. It determines whether a scene feels devotional, theatrical, restrained, or suspended in time. Because this body of work is concerned with memory, endurance, and presence, the lighting often creates a sense of containment or hush, allowing the viewer to spend time with the image. The palette supports that pause. It holds the work in a register where beauty and gravity can coexist without being resolved.

Ian Stone, In the smoke, the body remembers itself. Oil on linen, 30 x 24 inches.

5. Can you walk us through your process from research to finished painting? At what point do archival materials begin to translate into visual form?

For this body of work, everything began with reading. I spent a long time with historical texts that trace the persecution of queer people across different periods, as well as poetry and other forms of writing that allow emotion and image to surface together. Certain passages or stories create images very clearly in my mind, and those mental images often become the starting point for a painting.

Research alone isn’t enough for me, though. I traveled to many of the places I was reading about, visiting the actual sites where these histories unfolded. Being physically present—standing on the ground where violence occurred or where lives were quietly lived—adds a weight that reading alone can’t provide. That embodied experience gives the ideas a gravity that carries through the work.


Ian Stone, Truth made unbearable (drawing). Coloured pencil on paper, 14 x 10.25 inches


Archival material begins to translate visually when it intersects with my own personal history. I don’t attempt to illustrate specific events or figures. Instead, I allow those histories to filter into the objects I choose and the way they are arranged. Domestic objects, still life, and ornament become ways of holding memory, loss, and endurance at a distance—allowing the work to speak without reenacting harm.

By the time I am painting, research is no longer a source I consult; it has become part of the structure of the image itself. The painting becomes a place where historical record, physical presence, and personal memory are layered together, asking the viewer to sit with what persists rather than what has been erased.

Ian Stone, Between flame and smoke. Oil on linen, 16 x 12 inches.

6. Light plays a critical role in your paintings, particularly in relation to flame. How do you technically approach painting light, as illumination and also as metaphor?

Technically, light is treated as something concrete and directional rather than atmospheric. The flame is not painted as a diffuse glow, but as a specific source that shapes everything around it—edges, surfaces, and space. I let light behave honestly, so it exerts pressure on the image rather than softening it. In that sense, illumination is structural before it is symbolic.

The metaphorical weight of the flame comes from early modern clerical discourse around sodomy. In writings attributed to figures such as Fray Pedro de León, sodomites were compared to butterflies drawn toward flame—tempted repeatedly, each time burning a little more, until they were consumed entirely. This image framed desire as both attraction and self-destruction, and it was used to justify correction, punishment, and eradication.
By isolating flame within the still-life tradition, I remove it from action and hold it in suspension. The light no longer consumes, but it also doesn’t redeem. It becomes something that attracts and mesmerizes without resolution. In this context, illumination is not revelation or salvation, but exposure—asking what happens when desire, danger, and beauty originate from the same source.

For me, painting light is about sustaining that tension. The flame illuminates, but it also implicates. It shapes how the viewer looks and how long they are willing to stay. Light becomes a force of attention rather than transcendence, and the still life becomes a space where that attention can no longer be avoided.

Ian Stone, Side fem. Oil on linen, 30 x 24 inches.


7. Are there moments when the act of painting itself feels reparative, or, conversely, when it feels like a confrontation with the violence you are referencing?

For me, painting is less reparative than it is investigative. There has always been something I needed to understand about why coming into myself as a gay man felt so difficult, confusing, and fraught. My own coming out was not simply about naming desire, but about confronting a deep sense of hesitation and fear that didn’t seem to originate entirely with me. I began to ask how it was possible to understand present-day prejudice without knowing where it came from in the first place.

That question led me into research and, eventually, into making openly queer work around 2018. Initially, it was a way of confronting my own internalized homophobia. But the deeper I went, the clearer it became that much of what is labeled homophobia is, at its core, a fear and policing of femininity—both in men and in women. The violence directed at queer bodies is often inseparable from misogyny, from the insistence that softness, ornament, and care must be suppressed or corrected.

Painting these subjects doesn’t feel reparative in a comforting sense. It doesn’t resolve wounds or offer closure. Instead, it holds questions in place—about why certain expressions of masculinity are rewarded while others are punished, and how those hierarchies persist today in subtle forms: microaggressions, coded language, and even within queer communities themselves. Some of the most overt policing of masculinity I’ve encountered has come from other gay men—through phrases like “masc for masc,” detached from the historical context in which effeminacy was criminalized and violently punished.

I think about this often in relation to my own family. When I told my mother I was dating someone new, the first thing she asked was, “Is he effeminate?” Not because she wanted to judge, but because she wanted to protect me. She understood intuitively that femininity still attracts risk, attention, and consequence. That awareness—loving, fearful, and inherited—speaks volumes about how history continues to move through our bodies and relationships.

So the act of painting, for me, is a confrontation—but not only with historical violence. It’s also a confrontation with how that violence lingers: how it shapes desire, self-presentation, and even the ways we try to protect one another. Rather than offering repair, the work asks viewers to sit with these continuities and to question what forms of prejudice we have learned to normalize, even as we believe we’ve moved past them.