Stacy Leeman’s Slide List

1. Book of Esther P6, oil on canvas, 10″ x 8″, $400. Available.
2. Drawing #26, pastel on paper, 25.5″ x 20″, $1,100. Available.
3. Book of Esther W5, oil on wood, 30″ x 30″ $2,000. Available.
4. Book of Esther C2, collage with paper and paint on paper, 14.5″ x 13.5″, $500. Available.
5. Book of Esther C3, collage, 32″ x 46″, $3,000. Available.
6. Drawing #25, pastel on paper, 19.5″x 25.5″. Unavailable.
7. Book of Esther P15, oil on canvas, 9″ x 9″, $400. Available.
8. Book of Esther P8, oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″, $400. Available.
9. Drawing 28, pastel on paper, 20″ x 25.5″. Unavailable.
10. Book of Esther P12, oil on canvas, 9″ x 9″, $400. Available.
11. Book of Esther C4, collage, 13″ x13″, $750. Available.
12. Drawing 27, pastel on paper, 19.75″ x 25.5″. Unavailable.
13. Book of Esther P16, oil on canvas, 30″ x 30″, $2,000. Available.
14. Drawing 30, pastel on paper, 8.5″ x 11″, $400. Available.
15. Book of Esther P14, oil on canvas, 9″ x 9”, $400. Available.

So much is not what it seems.

A young, beautiful girl is forced to marry a king she barely knows. She has to keep her ethnicity hidden; yet when the time comes she stands up for her nation and saves it from annihilation by a genocidal maniac. Though she is a powerful queen, she must risk her life by visiting the king without permission. She has to decide whether to be the agent of change in her people’s salvation, or just another anonymous victim. In the end, G-d chooses to be a hidden presence and to save the Jewish people through her actions.

The young woman is named Esther. Her name comes from the Hebrew, Hester, meaning hidden. Each spring for two millennia, the Jewish people have celebrated her story of salvation from evil by telling her story and dressing in costume to make present the hidden in ourselves. I cannot help but love the courageous, beautiful heroine of the story who risks her life for her people. Yet it is not only Esther’s bravery that intrigues me, but also the hidden nature of divine intervention. I love being part of a tradition that analytically parses text apart, and struggle to believe in that which we don’t see or can’t touch.

I love to read stories full of ambiguity and contemplate holes in the text. In the Jewish tradition, our stories are told and retold and we reexamine and question them again always looking for new insights. Our heritage values the question, often answering questions with more questions.

As a visual artist, this same sensibility prevails. I love the paintings that tell me the least. I prefer to stand before a Jackson Pollock or Joan Mitchell work ogling at the usage of paint and mark making to decipher the story or emotion the artist hid in the mystery of their abstract work.

Hidden Presence is also an appropriate description for my artistic process. Buried within each of my series of paintings is an idea that has its origin in a philosophical or religious dilemma, often an ancient Jewish text, which I wrestle with in my studio practice. This problem provides a structure for the series of paintings – colors, shapes, underlying images, composition – that I then resolve through the aesthetics of the painting process.

The Vessel series started as a response to a striking photo a friend gave me years ago of empty vessels scintillating in the sunlight. I studied a Talmudic text about the nature of beauty. In Upstream, I explored a Talmudic passage praising a bird for being able to swim against the current as a metaphor for the boundaries and contradictions that seem to inhabit my world.

Finally, in my new series of paintings, Book of Esther, the works relate to the Biblical Book of Esther through symbolic images including crowns, maps of the Persian Empire, and images from master paintings of Esther. The color palette reflects colors traditionally associated with royalty including rich crimsons, violets, gold and silvers.

Our world values knowledge that can be proved, that is scientific and quantifiable. I am intrigued by the ideas in between the things that come from our minds but that are also intuitive and emotive. Through these works I challenge the viewer to look for and try to understand the hidden presence.

I like to test boundaries and explore contradictions.

If there is one quality that embodies my life it is that I constantly struggle with ideas, values, beliefs and practices that appear to be so obviously conflicting to the rest of the world. I consider myself to be an Orthodox Jew and a Feminist, and in so doing I struggle with melding a patriarchal 3,000-year old tradition with a 21st-century college-educated Feminist perspective.

As an artist, I find the solitary moments in my studio to be the most profound moments of my life; yet, I seek the tradition and ritual that binds my to a community. I love to study Jewish texts that date back thousands of years and find new insights and ways of reading ambiguities contained within them, and then deal with them in the aesthetics of abstract art. I find meaning in the struggle to prove that these qualities can coexist in my life and in my art.

These tensions imbue my paintings and drawings with deeply personal meanings. In them, I explore my religious and philosophical questions and ideas. Often inspired by texts that I’ve read, I later return to explore these in my oeuvre.  One of my most recent series, Upstream, evokes these struggles. The artwork is based on a tale found in the Talmud, a book of the Jewish oral tradition, in which a duck is shown to be kosher if it is swimming upstream.  I loved the notion of the tradition heralding the animal for having the strength to go against the stream.

For these paintings I used a methodology that I have created over the past ten years for taking these ideas, developing my own personal symbolism and gestures, and turning these into abstract artwork.  I began with imagery from photographs that I took of ducks in my neighborhood.  Then I created works on paper using the images to create solvent transfers as well as iron-on transfer on fabric.

Simultaneously, I created small wooden panels and works on canvas (which vary in scale from 8” x 8” to 34” x 56”). Each series has a palette with a symbolic set of colors that reference the ideas in the work. Finally I use objects that symbolically relate to the series to help create unique marks and textures.  For example in the Upstream series I used feathers to paint with.  The symbolic use of something related to the duck bespeaks my educational experiences.

As I began to finish some of the small paintings on paper I then made sketches from them to create highly finished pastel paintings.  Lastly, I create collages using the same imagery and paper cut outs with Japanese and Thai handmade papers.

My process means that at any given time I am working on 16 small works on paper, a couple of works on wood panel, two to four works on canvas, two collages and a pastel.  This process allows me to challenge my brain to work in unexpected ways. The small works are delicate and intimate yet the process is fast and immediate.  The works on canvas and collage have sometimes years of marks layered upon each other. There is a power in a single brush stroke in a larger work that cannot be attained in small paintings. Finally, I create pastel works that are tranquil and organized, though in an unusual format of an abstract work.

Like the concepts that underlie my painting, my process involves a melding of the new ideas and traditional methods into my own style as a symbolic gestural painter. I love the way Titian coated his canvas with a color so I create a light wash from one of the colors in the palette that I use. My gestural marks are inspired by de Kooning, Krasner, and Pollock.  In some ways the works reference Susan Rothenberg, yet the symbolism and stories behind them are specifically related to my tradition.  I was raised in an era where Pollock saying that his works had nor or little content was not fashionable.  I was taught to have thought and meaning behind my works to make them relevant.

Like most artists today I am a post-Modernist.  We borrow from tradition and create what Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the founder of the Modern Orthodox movement in Judaism, calls chiddushei or insights.  For Rabbi Soloveitchik these are insights into reading text.  For me these insights are for both reading text and creating new methods and language of painting.

Columbus, Ohio
December 2011

Vermont Stories

In the past several decades there has been talk about the death of painting.

In fact, quite the opposite is true. Paintings are the antidote to a society that is built on speed and immediate gratification. Making paintings – and viewing them – forces people to be quiet and still. As long as painters find ways to reinvent the language of paint to include contemporary ideas and manners of applying paint, then the medium will continue to be relevant. Art challenges viewers. People often look at figurative or objective work and think they know what the artist intended; so often these precursory judgments are not accurate and the works of art are much more complicated than they first appear. The same viewer will often be intimidated by abstract art and refuse even to try and engage with it.

For me, though, abstraction is the attempt to find new ways to explore ideas and stories. Though it may not be readily apparent in the finished product, my art emerges out of a narrative; but I don’t believe in stories that are simple and straightforward. The more I seek the narrative, the more paradoxical and complicated it seems to become. As these narratives are put into paint, I am forced to be still and consider color, line, composition and texture, and to contemplate each mark as it impacts the work as a whole.

Abstract art should not be feared. Consider this: In the natural world we see organizations and patterns that create structure — a pattern of lines in a forest or the repetition of the colors of different flowers or leaves. In my abstract paintings I create order through repetition and motion to unify my works. I often begin with a structure or symbols to guide my painting but eventually I move beyond that underlying structure and create a work that is organized by my responses to what is happening on the surface of the piece.

My Synagogue Migrations paintings were created as part of a series for a show with the Jewish Art Salon based in New York. The works echo the American narrative of the 20th and 21st centuries by following the path of traditional urban synagogues migrating to suburban areas. I used photos from the synagogue that I grew up in and from a Baptist Church that had been the synagogue when my father was a child. The palette corresponded to the stained glass windows, the stone exterior and the bronze ritual furnishings. In addition to painting with brushes, for these works I also painted with drafting tools through which I allude to the facades of the buildings which house our spiritual lives and communities.

I created Yaakov Blesses Yehuda about a biblical passage of the patriarch Jacob (Yaakov) blessing his son, Judah (Yehudah). “A lion cub is Yehudah; from the prey, my son, you elevated yourself. He crouches, lies down like a lion, and like an awesome lion, who dares rouse him?” The blessing concludes with imagery lush in color and beautiful in its language. “He will tie his donkey to the vine; to the vine branch his donkey’s foal; he will launder his garments in wine and his robe in the blood of grapes. Red eyed from wine and white toothed from milk.” In these paintings, I use imagery of the lion cub, the lion, the donkey, wine and grapes as well as colors that recall the red and white and purple of the end of Yehudah’s blessing.

The vessel series began as a response to a beautiful photo a friend shared years ago of empty vessels, or bottles that were capturing the sunlight. The bottles were intense colors and the light passing through them was striking. For these paintings I took photographs of bottles that I owned varying in color and shape. I studied a Talmudic text in which the rabbinical sages interpret a text that interprets the biblical phrase, “zeh keli ani v’anvehu,” as meaning to make beautiful or embellish. As an artist the notion of beautifying is a divine act in which the artist sets herself up to mimic the Creator by creating. As abstract artist Barnett Newman wrote, “Man’s origin was that of an artist and he set him up in a Garden of Eden close to the Tree of Knowledge of right and wrong in the highest sense of divine revelation…. What is the explanation of the seemingly insane drive of man to be painter and poet if it is not an act of defiance against man’s fall and an assertion that he return to the Adam of the Garden of Eden?”

How do you know when your painting is finished? People love to ask this question about abstract work. “When it feels done,” I tell them. My process is very intuitive. Each mark that I put on the image I look at and respond to the way that it has altered the image. At some point the image is resolved when I have no problems or qualms about it. As Hans Hofmann a great painter and maybe even more distinguished teacher said, “Ah, yes, there is a secret, but you must find it for yourself. It does not belong to me.”