Going Fast Being Still - New Paintings by Mark Lesser
The Haley-Henman Modern Art Gallery announced its Grand Opening with the solo exhibit of Mark Lesser’s new paintings, “Going Fast Being Still” from October 10 to November 17, 2007. The reception for the artist was held on Saturday, October 20, 2007 from 7 to 10 pm.
Recently moving from Los Angeles, Lesser found inspiration for these new paintings from a very fast paced experience of driving by his new surroundings in north-central Texas. He used his cell phone camera—not stopping but speeding by the terrain. The experiences are brief and intense. They capture the motion of “going fast”. Lesser used these images and combined them with his spontaneity of color and composition, allowing the motion to exist in still yet another dimension of “being still”, in a meditative manner. It is as if we have the fast paced images of movement seared into our visual memory—a blur of color and an intense feeling of movement--that is then transformed when we view the painting.
Lesser challenges his images by the tension of abstract color fields and spontaneous expression. His new paintings build upon a body of work that seeks to maintain a connection with realistic references infused with an emotional process of luminous fields of color. He builds the fields with thin, transparent floods of color over color. He follows the school of color field abstractionists, especially inspired by Frankenthaler, Rothko, and Kahn.
He acknowledges the gift his grandfather gave him in seeing beyond the finite and into the infinite. His grandfather, a tailor who emigrated from Russia in 1906, was an artist and poet. He painted beautiful ornate images using stencils from tomato cartons. His images and poems conveyed beauty in things that opened the perception of viewers from finite objects to infinite possibilities of color and spontaneity.
Lesser was born in Chicago (1964) and started his artistic career in New York City with exhibits at Fiorucci. In Los Angeles he exhibits at the Warehouse Gallery and the Santa Monica Fine Arts Studio. Most of his work is found in private and corporate collections. He recently received his doctorate in clinical psychology. He currently resides in Frisco, Texas with his sixteen year old daughter, Taylor, and their dog, Lucky.
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