Meet the Artists
About Muse Gallery Events Calendar
Join Us!
|
ARTIST PROFILE - Linda Fanning-Lefevre
Selected Works (Click on the thumbnail for larger photo)
Title: Green Cupboard
Size: 32" x 30"
Date: 2001
Medium: Oil on linen |
Title: Bare Beach
Size: 30" x 32"
Date: 2001
Medium: Oil on linen |
Such a puzzle my recent work is, even to me. But let me free-associate
for a minute: what seems a jumble in an urban landscape moves toward
focus when I notice the references to figures, often dismembered figures,
parts of torsos, headless bodies, assorted body parts (some sexual)
scattered throughout the paintings. Surprisingly, these images of
vulnerability and brokenness combine with a playfulness, and even
with an old-fashioned sweetness. Domesticity, kitchen scenes,
bowls warm with remembered home-made macaroni, tables
cluttered with the ancient recipes of Italian family favorites, lace
curtains lifting white and sweet in the fragrant breeze, the clean
smell of laundry-on-the-line, the loving work of women in the
home -- a wave of tender images from my childhood in small-town
Peckville, Pennsylvania. And still my loving Irish father, a miner with
black lung. Other images include butcher knives, hatchets,
and weapons. Not sweet, disturbing. Not tender, threatening.
Unpleasant, but real. Not to be denied. Not to be ignored.
But then boats, ladders, other ways out, offer transcendence
and resolution. The fragility of life in a hard-scrabble, brutal
world, and also the triumph of living with, and beyond, this
stone-hard, brutal reality. I honor this reality, but I also
honor memory and dream and wish and hope as alternative,
valid perspectives on what we so simplistically call 'the real.'.
I honor intuition, lightness, humor, and love. Life does go on.
And life shall go on, triumphantly.
|