Stan Stokes, the prolific, award-winning, California aviation artist, has been doing what he loves for more than twenty years. Generally considered to be one of the top five aviation artists in the world, based on the current sales rate of his limited editions, Stan may now be American's most popular aviation artist. After studying art in college, Stan began his professional art career painting highly detailed landscape scenes. However, his true love was flying and aviation history. Eventually a friend interested Stan in doing a painting of his aircraft. The rest is history.

Stan has now completed close to one thousand aviation paintings during his long career including pieces for NASA, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, and the Air Force Museum and Wright Paterson Field. Stan has also done a number of fabulous, life-like murals, His most recent mural was done for the new Palm Springs Aviation Museum, and depicts the Battle of Midway. Noted for both the tremendous amount of detail in and the historical accuracy of his work, the artist is quite capable of adding a highly artistic flair to many of his pieces.

Stan's signature pieces have been his fabulous naval aviation scenes involving carrier take-offs and landings. However, his range covers everything from World War I to modern era war birds, non-military aircraft of all types, and space scenes. His primary medium is acrylic on canvas, and he does not use an air brush for any of his work. The artist has also painted many classic car and racing car scenes for his loyal clientele.

Stan enjoys putting the observer in a unique viewpoint to maximize the drama of each scene. Unlike many other artist, Stan takes the time to painstakingly reproduce all the intimate details in his paintings. This detail imparts an accuracy to his depictions which is a step beyond photo-realism. The effect yields phenomenal depth to his completed paintings, imparting in the process a three-dimensional quality to them. Stan has been represented by the Stokes Collection of Carmel, California since 1993.