* Stanley Boxer; Artist Called ‘Sculptor of Paint’

Stanley Boxer, 73, veteran New York artist often called a “sculptor of paint” for his thickly brushed abstract paintings. Boxer drew obsessively as a child growing up in New York, often sketching the cowboys and Indians he saw in movies. He entered the Navy at 16 to fight in World War II. After the war, his older brother encouraged him to apply to the Art Students League, where an instructor told him he had talent and ought to start taking classes immediately. He became a noted painter and sculptor but preferred to be known as a “practitioner” because he believed that constant practice was the only way to excel at art. He was known for troweling on pigment, using his fingers, brushes and a palette knife to create textures and patterns that intimate florals or landscapes. His canvases often had mile-long titles, inspired by e.e. cummings, such as “hammeringheatchillingnoon.” He had his first solo exhibition of paintings in New York in 1953. Later he showed regularly with Tibor de Nagy, the Andre Emmerich Gallery and the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries. The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., held a Boxer retrospective in 1992, and his work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. On Monday of complications from colon cancer in Pittsfield, Mass.