Lemmons > Bio and Reviews
Globe News column: Art Beat, December 19, 1999
December, 1999 show at Early Slick: by Hunter Ingalls
"Expressive Nudes and a Few Abstractions," at Early Slick, Paramount Boulevard and 26th Avenue, features work by Mardy Lemmons. These are paintings and painted assemblages - the latter being a matter of either cutting up and re-positioning canvas imagery or adding other materials. "Male Torso" is a composite of wood, wire and canvas historically reminiscent of flayed beef carcass paintings.
There's a denseness here - technically, a matter of pastel and oil washes over gesso, where surfaces are allowed to run. As for content, Lemmons states, "I can get into moods better with nudes - they're not intended as provocative come-ons."
Female form is seen not as an object for male desire, but as an intense world of its own. "Therapy" and "Life Feeds on Life" (a pregnant torso) exemplify the artist's awareness of the more serious dimensions of feminine physical existence. Underlying these, as well as the several abstractions, is Lemmons' own committment to bringing form and texture to life from two-dimensional surfaces.
Hunter Ingalls held faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin and Columbia University, where he earned a Ph.D.
