Twenty-eight oil paintings and gouaches by Lisa Houck Leary are currently on view in the South Gallery of the Art and Graphic Design Department at Greenfield Community College. This is a superior body of work: and an instance where a painter’s involvement with a particular image, in this case, the figure in a landscape site, can be restated within a narrow range of subject-matter, and can still avoid the tediousness of duplication.
Without resorting to either hard-edge structures, or to excessively fussy detail, Leary sets up refinements in her paintings through strong color identity, elegance of surface, and classical positioning of figures on sloping ground-planes. The gestural familiarity of these subtle figures is confounded by a sense that they are either standing thigh deep in water, or are rooted into the floor or ground.
The figures are further integrated into sites by shapes that are either logical, as in architecturally-vaulted suggestions, or are as capricious as some of the bulbous forms in Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”. We can question whether parts of these shape-spaces exist in the landscapes, or are intended to suggest the product of a viewer’s optical system.
In some pieces a strong identity of a primary color has been developed; while in others, a striking absence of color predominates. Extensive reworking of the canvases has produced some rich surfaces of layered paint. While it has been a convention among painters to both mix and locate colors according to a system of harmonic grouping, (for example: a palette based on red-violet, blue-green, and yellow-orange), an intriguing alternative has been used in these paintings. A primary color dominates; and subtle variants on that primary color generates levels of activation on the canvas. In the achromatic paintings, mixtures with black, and bumpy, time-worn surfaces challenge our sense of color and order (which has all too often been dictated by Easter-eggs and gift-wrap).
It is difficult to categorize these paintings into any one of the major directions painting has taken recently. There is a refreshing absence of nailed-hands, snarling dogs, and flames. The quiet, contemplative power of these paintings is very gratifying. It is also rewarding to see evidence of a a painter’s willingness to spread her concepts over so many pieces in so concentrated manner of commitment. The exhibit will remain in the gallery through December 14th; and is open to all visitors from 8:00-6:00, Monday through Friday.”
Peter Dudley,
Review written for the Greenfield Recorder, Nov. 30, 1989