THE NATURAL EYE
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REVIEW
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by Kevin Nance
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It’s pretty common to find representational artists whose ambition is outstripped by their skill in drawing and painting. It’s unusual to find the opposite: artists whose technical prowess is well out in front of their ability to conceive and compose. Lesa Aker, a southern Kentucky artist whose dazzling technique with pastels is on full display in “The Natural Eye,” an exhibit of her work by Arts Connect at Central Bank’s John G. Irvin Gallery, is in the second group.
The realism of these works in pastel—a medium most often used by artists with some significant degree of abstraction in their paintings and drawings—falls just short of photorealism; you can clearly see the artist’s supremely confident hand in evidence everywhere. But Aker’s stock in trade is her extreme commitment to representing her subjects with fidelity. In these works, animals and landscapes look pretty much as they would in photographs, complete with sharp foregrounds and slightly blurred backgrounds (as one sees in photos shot with telephoto lenses, delivering shallow depth of field). Aker can draw anything. That’s what she does—it’s almost all she does—and she does it with shocking skill. For some viewers, that will be more than enough. It’s no small thing, the way Aker, a self-taught artist, captures the individual hairs in the pelt of a magnificent lion or tiger, or the smoky spray that rises from the foot of a waterfall at Cumberland Falls. |
Her rendering of the veins that traverse the faces of horses in “The Look of Love,” “Golden Quarter” and “In the Spotlight” (the last featuring dramatic lighting worthy of Rembrandt) is nothing short of anatomically correct.
She also has a warm feeling for the companionability of horses, the way they crowd together and lean on each other in fields and pastures. But to create powerfully original works of art, an artist needs a unique perspective, a particular vision, and subject matter of his or her own. This, I think, is where Aker is still developing. My favorite pieces of Aker’s are her strangest and most mysterious, almost all involving winged creatures: a sinister raven in “The Trickster,” a hypnotic bat in “Look Into My Eyes,” an inquisitive crow in “The Joker.” Aker seems to connect with something wonderfully alien and a little dangerous in these three pictures that’s missing elsewhere in this show. Here’s hoping she heads more in this direction in the future. |
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