Lance Letscher Stephen L. Clark Gallery Video

[Music] welcome to the stephen l clark gallery i'm steve this is another chapter in the lance ledger story this 19th century house owned by sally and bill whitley for near 50 years is a house of stories oh henry lived here bill steve harrigan bill broyles and bud shrake all wrote here lance's collages are graphic in nature but rooted in narrative many being done on old books let's go take a look [Music] so this one's about a flood obviously there's a small house and there's a waterfall it's broken up in layers sort of of space with the plants plants were primarily chosen for color trees and flowers and all the water imagery came from old lithographs 1950s lithographs of sailing ships i've been working in collage since about 1996 at first they were very simple kind of drawings cut out and superimposed on one another very minimal no color and over the years the work has evolved into the present kind of phase which is highly coloristic a lot of the imagery is based on nature i buy tree catalogs from 1930 um you know different different vintage printing i emphasize the quality of the printing so a lot of the materials that i purchase are things that are unusually printed uh special color drops on on the fruit or in the plants uh ocean illustrations from walter foster how to paint books there's a painterly quality to the collages this year that has kind of crept in and become a theme a dominant theme uh this is where i work most of the time i spend most of my days looking through this magnifying glass and using this short knife to to cut out the items that i use in my collages so when i first um cut everything out i assemble it without glue so this this whole piece is um in transition kind of basically when i start to glue it up i'll take everything up and and um put down a board and cut the board with glue and then start coating the backs of the pieces with with glue individually just kind of rub the back like that um and start gluing it down i sort of have to memorize the piece to get everything kind of generally back where they where it is i have kind of general guidelines in my head that the more colorful trees are going to go across the top of the horizon and you know the apples are going to go up through the center like this and there's the peaches in the center but the pieces tend to morph and change generally as i glue them up and sometimes it's for the better i try to let things happen i try to memorize where everything is going to go but because that's that's really kind of impossible like things change as i'm gluing it up but i'm an opportunist and i i believe in accidents and serendipity and i want things to change in a good way as i'm working so i'll really concentrate hard when i'm gluing things up and sometimes they get better i kind of keep working on the pieces until there's a sense of balance and of saturation i don't want them to be too busy but i want them to be dense enough to where there's um there's a longevity to the piece there's a lot to see and there's a lot that you don't see at first that you see gradually over time and so that's that's kind of the point that i tend to push them to and it's over time it's evolved and become more the pieces have become more dense and and layered multi-layered this piece is a lot about space there's a sense of space there's different parts that have implications of perspective and the distance of the mountains compared to the proximity of the fruit for instance i want to i want to have it a dense kind of spatial quality so it's it it's a little bit intangible um the the decision uh to make when it's actually finished but i kind of have an intuition for it i guess [Music] this is one of my favorite pieces in the show it's built up on tin and wire that's been stapled down with a roofing stapler and then collage with paper over it so this section in the center you can see through to the substrate the that i just described this is the largest piece in the show it's 60 by 85 inches so it's about 5 feet by 7 feet it started out as a smaller piece this this section right here and because of the availability of the materials that i was using the fish imagery sea life ocean ocean imagery because i had so much of it i decided to expand the piece and make it really [Music] large [Music] i just want to say thank you to stephen clark for giving me the show and the opportunity to show and and i hope as many of you as possible can come out and see the work in person it's it's quite a different experience seeing it in person as opposed to on the computer screen or digitally [Music] thanks for the virtual visit come for an actual visit and create your own story from lance's work we're here 11 to 4 tuesday through saturday and by appointment we practice safe art so you

Channel: Virtual Tour by Bruce Malone

Views: 5,922

Keywords: Lance Letscher, collage, art, art gallery, Stephen L. Clark Gallery, Stephen L. Clark, Austin, Texas, culture, imagination, storytelling, story

Id: wyyUCtaG0zI

Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020