Stacey Mandell

“Art is a visual language and Stacey Mandell’s art is language made visible, art that speaks to you. Stacey Mandell’s art lives in the pantheon of great word artists, and like them, her ideas and aesthetic flows across several media from paintings to installations. This is work that is deep and multi-layered. But if you never get past the surface, you’ll have a very pleasurable visual experience. The pictures are wonderfully composed, balanced in color and form, clear and bold. You can tell there is more going on, that each detail is highly considered and composed. There is most definitely an order and logic to this. As you explore deeper, you discover that there is a narrative and now you get to re-discover the work all over again.” – Paul Fisher, gallery owner and curator, Paul Fisher Gallery, West Palm Beach, FL

Stacey’s passion is the Art of Gregg Shorthand, and she is dedicated to preserving this beautiful, universal writing system through art. Stacey learned Gregg Shorthand as a secretary, and fell in love with this beautiful, phonetic writing system. Created and developed in the late 1800s, Gregg Shorthand was the most popular form of pen stenography in the United States. Because Gregg Shorthand is based on phonetics, it records the sounds of the speaker, not the spellings. Therefore, in any spoken language, Gregg Shorthand is ultimately a global writing system. With the advent of technology, however, the usage of shorthand has declined and its instruction is nearly extinct.

Following a 20-year career as an attorney, Stacey relocated to South Florida, retired from the practice of law, and began pursuing her passion. She is perhaps the only artist who utilizes learned shorthand as an art form. Her medium is the canvas, the metal, the wood, the paper, and the paint. Her writing is in Gregg Shorthand, Cursive, and Braille. She uses shorthand words and phrases as an abstract gestural form, in which the form’s meaning provides a narrative abstraction on the canvas.