TitleRuth (Face)
Artist
John Lees
(American, b. 1943)
Date1979-2005
MediumOil on panel
DimensionsUnframed: 10 1/4 x 8 3/8 in.
Framed: 12 1/2 x 10 1/2 x 2 in.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, September 23, 2009
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Gift of artist, courtesy of Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, 2010
Object number2009.15
Label TextPainter and draughtsman John Lees works in a lengthy process-based method of layers to create works that have a strongly temporal dimension to them. Born in Denville, New Jersey, Lees attended the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, receiving his BFA in 1964 and his MFA in 1967. He had his first solo exhibition in 1969 and his first solo show in New York at the Edward Thorp Gallery in 1977. The artist often works on paintings and drawings for years, building up and breaking down or scraping away layers of pigment to create richly textured surfaces. Lees works in both landscape and with singular subjects such as a bathtub or a portrait as here in "Portrait of Ruth." His works have an obsessive quality about them that has led one reviewer to refer to him as one of the "grandest eccentrics of modern American painting" and he has drawn comparisons to the work of James Ensor, Leonardo, Fragonard, R. Crumb, and Joseph Cornell. Lees' paintings also have affinities to classical Roman fresco painting, and appear to reveal chapters of history through their layers of thickly encrusted paint.
