Arts & Leisure
Richard Lethem's arresting color-saturated reflections
By Rose Safran
YORK VILLAGE - "The Shape We're In," taken from a title of his novelist son Jonathan Lethem's recent book, is the name Berwick artist Richard Lethem has assigned to the York Public Library's ongoing exhibition of his art consisting of oils, acrylics (mostly), watercolors and mixed media works in which swirls, curves and broad sweeps of brilliant color transmit dynamic motion, unsettling character and diabolical inferences.
Little stands still in most of these striking chock-a-block-full images; something is happening, has happened, is about to happen or can merely be surmised. Inferences aren't always clear, aren't supposed to be either; ambiguity, as in life itself, is pervasive. A visit to Lethem's color-drenched universe is like attending an eternal carnival, a circus in which the performers, whether man or beast, have often tipped the balance, gone beyond the possibilities available to them, are cast in exhilarating even demanding and impossible roles they may not be all that prepared for, but which might captivate and at times even scare them. And us.
Take the portrait of the lady called "Blue Bow" - yes, there is a rich deep blue bow above her dark nest of a hairdo, her eyes are shining crazily bright, her red-blotch lips set in an exaggerated smile; a bauble adorns her neck, her shoulders are bare. It might be a night at the opera all tied tightly together with one about-to-explode gleeful face. Or, better still, take any one of the drama-packed "horse" images, say, "Blue Rider/White Horse," in which one wonders "Who's in charge here?" - the horizontal man, who floats on - in fact, seems dropped on - the horse, or the horse that turns his head in the man's direction - in any case, they're linked in a sort of casual balancing act. Horse and rider are inseparably bound in "Sonora: The Horse Driver;" with hot, brilliant Kandinsky-like colors emphasizing the wildness and fierce motion; you almost sniff the sweat, hear the hoofs, feel the anxiety, the determination in the onward push of jockey and horse. In the action-packed "Running the Ponys" human figures appear to accept the challenge of and risk involved with keeping up with and/or directing the moving animals.
But, oh my, there is wit, too. Take "Day of Noses" - a musical triumph with multiples of instruments, faces, hats and noses (I confess I couldn't find 365, though!) - a noisy festival if there ever was one. In the amusing "Book Lust" the face consumes the pages and you can almost sense the saliva dripping into this text-eating. To the right of the library entrance is the colorful "Windy Day Salesman" featuring a gent who has multi-patterned ties galore draping this way and that from his neck; one fluttering hand-in-the air is a sort of double exposure, his legs are modernist curvilinear appendages barely touching the ground as if, like Mary Poppins, the tie salesman might float into the sky.
There are over 40 Richard Lethem paintings on exhibit here, so many of them filled with multiple images and imaginative elements, mystery, one could write volumes (and ask questions) on many. Noteworthy were: "Wings of Dorsehog," in which the horse and dog are co-mingled; the multi-angled "The Folk Singer" with an androgynous musician in bright yellow purple-dotted shirt, a guitar and nerd-style black-rimmed glasses, and several lovers gazing at each other such as in "Betrothal" and "Mountain Music" or "Lone Star Lovers" - this last, a comment on Texas romance. Above the fireplace is a large oil-on-canvas, an environmental statement, "Redwood" with two horizontally-massacred trees, its imagery including a little man able to fell these masterful products of nature - a painterly mix of golds, reds, greens, blue. Screaming, action-packed is "Barca Scooter" with two figures on one of the "bikes coming round the bend in a road, reckless, hopefully "making it," although encroached, closely crowded in by another at its tail. Then, too, a departure from all the action and with softer tones (aside from a single red flower), and with a quieter feeling is "Inside/Out," a mixed media on velum work with a Blue Jay on one side of a paned-glass window, and outlined eyes peering behind the glass.
Says Lethem, "People, people in movement, people with their animals, people inhabiting animals, people inside their heads...vulnerable people in love and in fear." He further comments that he is "exploring the inner workings of the human condition..." and that what happens is "...an inner dialog between the feeling eye and submerged consciousness."
Lethem, who as a young man had a Fulbright Scholarship in Paris, subsequently taught at Columbia University and lived in New York City for years before settling in Maine, where he has had residency grants, also states that he sees the "artist as extreme individualist confronting the need, the pull of relatedness, of community. Whether that relationship is human coupling, the dynamics of family, a collective activism or our symbiotic relationship with animals, the energy and tension is in that interaction."
Well, there's plenty of "inter" energy and tension here, along with excitement, wit, wildness, empathy, suggestion, comment, reflection and strangeness. Alive and vibrant as it is, this is no exhibit to just "walk through." Puzzling at times, it requires pausing, absorbing: the longer you look and permit your eyes to follow the explosions of juicy color, the numerous curves, the revealing lines, the varied expressions, the suggestive fragments, all the while noting the repetitions, excesses and gaps, sometimes sensing the subtleties, the action implications or apparent attitude, the more seduced you can become.
Yes, do stop by and count the noses.
