M. Louise Stanley

"[5][6] Stanley's paintings frequently focus on romantic fantasies and conflicts, social manners and taboos, gender politics, and lampoons of classical myths, portrayed through stylized figures, expressive color, frenetic compositions and slapstick humor.

[7][40][41][42] They expressed both private feelings, fears and fantasies and her politicized feminist consciousness—often through powerfully assertive, "brassy" 1930s-1940s-styled women that critics likened to Benton or Reginald Marsh figures, like those in her works The Mystic Muse and the Bums Who Sleep on the Golf Course Behind the Oakland Cemetery (1970) and Barroom Brawl (1977).

[22][43] Reviews noted Stanley's elongated, swan-necked figuration, expressive draftsmanship, tilted compositions and electric colors, and watercolor mastery;[22][44][40] Artforum critic Peter Plagens described it as attaining "a clumsy luminosity reminiscent of Marsden Hartley or John Kane,"[11] while the San Francisco Chronicle's Thomas Albright deemed it the "Bay Region's answer to Chicago's Hairy Who.

[49][16][9] The classical influence included Rococo oil brushwork and chiaroscuro modeling, mural-sized canvasses, elaborate faux-gilded, trompe-l'oeil proscenia and frames (e.g., Anatomy Lesson, 2003) and Pompeiian or French-baroque room installations with pedestals and papier-mâché Greek vases.

[49][16] Stanley used mythological elements (in works such as Cupid Chastised or the Morning After or Leda and the Swan) to both flesh out her modern dramas and evoke the irrational, while camouflaging the personal; her humor functioned to demystify myths, puncture art-world seriousness, and balance darker psychological themes.

[52][24][8][53] Art in America critic David S. Rubin wrote that Stanley's colorful worlds, ironic situations and Disneyesque characters (Athena, Adonis, nymph, cupid and satyr figures) both seduce and "bring us face-to-face with serious content"; he and others compare her visual strategies to those of painter Robert Colescott.

[50][2] Curator Susan Landauer suggests Stanley's work often carries a "mischievous confessional irony," achieved by inserting an alter ego that reviewers describe as an ideal woman as envisioned by junior-high teen steeped in 1950s daytime television, Archie Comics and Seventeen magazine.

[60][4][61][62] San Francisco Chronicle critic Charles Desmarais describes them as displaying "an antic intelligence and a loose style ... at [its] best when humorously sending up classical subjects and Old Master concerns" (e.g., Truncis Naribus (Faces Without Noses), 2014).

[63][10] Other works, however, were more psychologically subtle, their humor submerged in favor of more pointed, unflinching social commentary and somber humanism addressing homelessness (20th Century Genre, 1994), tragedy and grief (Memento Mori (After Columbine, 1999), and abuse of power (Bad Bankers, 2011), that Artweek compared to the satires of Daumier.