Douglas Stone (Canadian, b.1951) has been actively painting between Toronto and New York since graduating from the University of Guelph in the early 1970s. Moving to New York after his BFA, Stone immersed himself in the post-minimalist movement taking hold in the city. Stone is best known for his biographical abstractions which began in the early 1980s. His struggle with an AIDS diagnosis and subsequent near death experience in 1995 had a dramatic influence on his practice. "When I got out of the coma, I started making lists and writing notes to people, I had so many tubes in me I couldn't talk to them." Elements of his work are deeply autobiographical, such as the collaged notes from his death bed that document his experience with illness, recovery, and carrying on with life in spite of a deadly diagnosis.