Road Reotahi

Stanley was born in Tairua, Coromandel in 1936. He studied teaching and art in Auckland and Wellington from 1956 to 1958, and now resides in Auckland. Palmer is best known as a print maker, but he has painted sporadically from 1958 onwards. Since 1991 most of his time has been devoted to painting, in so far as he has made many transfer paintings on paper in the form of monoprints. These works all have a soft luminosity, whereas his paintings on canvas tend to be stronger in both colour and texture. In all his work, including his well known bamboo engravings, Palmer's style features a generalised definition of landforms. Conservation of the natural beauty of New Zealand?s coastline and offshore islands has been one of his concerns for many years. A feature of all of his work is the way that elements of a landscape are presented in a dramatic, nearly abstract form, contrasted with other parts which are smoothed and simplified. He has the ability to convey without romanticism or sentiment, a sense of past human use of the land.