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review
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Fur and Feathers, Tails and Toes
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Kevin Nance
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The extremely high technical skill in Aker’s work is both a marvel and, to my eye at least, a limitation. On one hand, I’m floored by what a fantastically skilled draftsperson she is. In a lifetime of looking at art in galleries and museums, I’ve rarely encountered anyone with her prodigious talent at drawing with chalk; her hand-to-eye coordination must be off the charts. On the other hand, the problem with virtuosity in any art form is that it can call attention to itself at the expense of an overall artistic vision. Subject matter counts. So does evidence of real engagement between what an artist sees and how she sees it.
Pastel paintings are not generally known for their precision. The dusty, oily, smudgy chalk lends itself to being used in a diffuse, expansively blended way to suggest subtly abstract landscapes and skyscapes with diaphanous weather effects, dappled light, rippling and reflective bodies of water. As an artistic medium, pastel would seem to have more in common with watercolor and charcoal than with, say, quick-drying acrylics, the type of paint favored by many representational artists. Lesa Aker, the Kentucky artist who has returned for “Fur and Feathers, Tails and Toes,” her second Arts Connect exhibit of pastel paintings at Central Bank’s John G. Irvin Gallery, turns all this conventional wisdom on its head. Although her backgrounds are often intentionally blurred in a manner that closely resembles that of photographic portraiture, her foreground figures |
— in this case animals, including dogs, horses and other creatures both domesticated and wild — are rendered in startling, near-photorealistic detail. The individual hairs in a dog’s fur, a cat’s whiskers, the veins in a horse’s nose appear very close to the way they would in a photograph.
As in her earlier body of work shown in this gallery, Aker’s “Fur and Feathers” is an uneven mix of the magnificently ordinary, the satisfyingly odd and the downright cutesy. Her strong images of dogs — especially in “Tails and Toes,” “Gus,” “Speak to the Sky” and “Moonlight Swim” — would be at home on the walls of sporting art collectors around the world. Her horses — including the dramatically lit “Illuminating Charm” and “Radiant Charm” and, best of all, “Bandolero” — are both gorgeously drawn and full of an intimate grandeur of a sort I associate with Rembrandt. Regrettably, Aker also has a weakness for adorable young animals adorably nuzzling each other in a manner I associate with TV commercials and greeting cards. Aker is at her best in this show when she ventures away from familiar domestic animals to their more feral counterparts in the wild, including a wonderful series of foxes and a quartet of young owls preparing to take flight. Let’s hope that in the future, the artist can spread her wings and follow those owls into the strange, dangerous, exhilarating night. |
Gus
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Tails and Toes
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Speak to the Sky
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Salt River Mustangs
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Bandolero
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Moonlight Swim
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