Artist Photo
“Broken Wharf,” acrylic gouache paint on board.
The only time in her life Mary Lesser did not make art was was during a four-year-period she was at the Yale Law School and, simultaneously, raising two small boys.
The two-career Lesser — or, if you count raising a family, three-career — has been showing widely in New Haven for many years, including prints and sculptures. Her most recent work is now up at City Gallery on Upper State Street and running through Dec. 23.
Allan Appel Photo
The title of the exhibition, “People & Places,” may be dull, but the inviting work is anything but. I think what she means by the title is that the work is varied, quiet and modest, and yet full of a painterly presence.
You can ask Lesser at the opening reception on Thursday, Dec. 7, from 5 to 7 p.m., with the talk by the artist beginning at 6 p.m.
The show unfolds in three sections. One wall displays colorful, almost childlike landscape compositions, all without human forms, done with a new (for Lesser) style of paint, bright acrylic gouache on small boards. A second wall contains archival digital photo prints, which Lesser has manipulated into black and white abstracts, with human forms haunting various urbanscapes. Finally, on the third wall of City Gallery’s shoe box-shaped white space, there is a combination of the preceding, with large photo prints to which Lesser has added color, while removing detail.
It’s a process that renders them abstract, yet they still contain very much human forms inhabiting a now colorful landscape.
That second wall — the black and white Photoshopped images — echoes a lot of Lesser’s previous work, which often featured human figures alone and suggested isolation and abandonment. In her art, Lesser said, “I’ve always had a dark side, that is pain and suffering in the world. For years I’ve done images of refugees and displaced persons. But this is different.”
Lesser’s mom, Paulene Heller, who graduated in 1931 from Columbia Law School, sent the future painter to art school at an early age. She was the kind of mother who appreciated art, but also wanted her daughter to have a remunerative career, to be able to stand on her own. Her mom, however, never anticipated how much Lesser would fall in love with art.
After trying to make a go of it as an artist for ten years, Lesser bit the bullet and went to law school, and after that hiatus, kept at it. “I never could give up art. It’s my soul. It’s who I am. That sounds stupid, but it’s true,” she said.
Lesser’s small, untitled landscapes on wood feature simplified images of houses, roads, and cactuses, which Lesser particularly loves. It suggests the kind of work she might have done when her mom sent her to those initial art classes.
“I liked the intensity of the color,” Lesser said of the acrylic gouache that she discovered and used this year for the new works. “I think it was time for me to go back to color.”
“Some of the images are childlike,” Lesser said. “Yes, I like that. Picasso said he spent his whole life trying to draw like a child,” she added.
City Gallery is open Thursday through Sunday from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m., or by appointment, at 994 State Street.