Lesley A. Powell’s “Jux Ta Position” …
by Lynn Woods
As a New York City-based Pilates teacher and former dancer and choreographer, Lesley Powell has a deep connection with the movement of the body. In 2016, after establishing a large studio in the attic of the Victorian house in Fleischmanns she shares with her brother and fellow Longyear Gallery member, Alan Powell, she began painting in earnest, and not surprisingly one of her favorite subjects has been bodies in motion.
Her current solo show at Longyear Gallery, entitled “Jux Ta Position,” further explores the theme, albeit mainly in the medium of collage. “Sometimes I’m too even with paint, and doing the collages freed me,” she says. Lesley experimented by layering her paintings in watercolor and acrylic with tissue paper; in other pieces, she printed photographs of her figure drawings on rice paper and built up the image with oil pastel, tissue, ribbons and acrylic paint or encaustic.
Unwanted Embrace
The resulting beautiful transparencies of her fragmented color shapes suggest a space that is rich with subtle tonalities, like prismatic ocean depths. Some of her compositions, with their angled or curved gravity-defying figures, suggest the frenetic energies of German Expressionism; I was also reminded of the early 20th-century watercolors of circus performers and Berlin nightlife by American artist Charles Demuth. It’s as if she had channeled the spirit of dance into her very process.
Some of her figures are derived from drawings made at her Pilates studio, others from quick life-drawing sessions, in which she drew two models at once. Yet another inspiration was cowboys riding a mechanical bull: these two pieces are infused with violence, the thrown bodies perhaps alluding to one’s sense of political despair and rage, a shift from the otherwise lyrical tone of her work. There are also scenes of gardens and temples observed on her recent travels to Japan and Nepal as well as in Central Park. An oil painting of a large striped cat meowing at a group of people seated on a bench in the foreground is cartoony, almost comical—it was inspired by a temple Lesley visited in Katmandu– while the image of a floating figure in a pool derived from her forced stay at her hotel in Katmandu due to the riots.
There are Hindu goddesses; purple figures seated on a bench along a winding white path, merging into the delicious green shade of Central Park; a delicate depiction of a Japanese bamboo garden; flags strung over the head of two yellow deities; and twin girls kicking soccer balls in a field described as a patchwork of subtle greens, blues, and dull pinks, the line of dark evergreens in the background indicating this is home, the Catskills. Lesley says she usually limits her palette to three colors, delicately mixing them to achieve her Klee-like gorgeous harmonies.
Walkway in Central Park
Bamboo Japan
Kathmandu
Two anomalies in the show are the large oil diptych of groping figures, entitled “Hands On/Off?”
and “Notes within a Space,” an abstract composition of acrylic paint layered with scraps of a musical score and accented with a few emphatic black lines. It’s both stark and ethereal, comprised of a figure that both stands out from and merges into the ground, which was conceived in part by turning the paper around, a technique Lesley learned at a workshop in New Orleans with Joan Fullerton.