Sheila Blake Responds

Options 2005 artist Sheila Blake responds to my criticism of her work:

Dear Lenny,

It's possible to look at two thousand, or 20 thousand paintings and still miss what looking is all about. Fortunately for me, Libby Lumpkin has that ability but I wish you'd at least concede that there are some things that you don't understand -- (I love Vermeer, but that has nothing to do with my intention; The tradition I work in has much more to do with Bonnard and Rousseau, Birchfield and Wolf Kahn).

My paintings can be looked at forever and they'll keep yielding up new things. The most superficial way of seeing them is that they're paintings of my back yard. (Although if you came out to my back yard, that's not what you'd see.) What I'm doing is constructing a reality and if you'd let yourself enter into the paintings, really walk around in them, you'd feel the air, and a specific moment in time. If you look up at the sky there'd be the surprise of that particular sky and the whole configuration of buildings and trees creates spaces that you can wander up to, through, even around and be endlessly satisfied. And there is also an ominous quality -- spring isn't the pastel spring that you think of, but some almost acidic feeling of being oversaturated with the moist air. Winter has to do with the rhythm of the bare branches and shadows and the golden light hitting the tops of the trees and sometimes a feeling of gloom. If you look at the pastels, the information is in them; they are my point of departure, but then the paintings are re-imagined to create a new reality.(That's not kudzu on the tree -- it's Virginia creeper, but what's on the real tree is English ivy. The crepe myrtle I lifted from Pinehurst N.C. along with the loblolly pine.) And then there's the light. The way I use color to create light has everything to do with the most subtle color interactions.

It's easy to dismiss as the cliché' of "light" -- but who really does this in the way I do? My color isn't representational, but creates a light and atmosphere which can be felt. I've never seen it and I'll bet you haven't either.

I'm writing this because I'm so disappointed at the superficial way you have categorized and dismissed my work. It's clear from your critique that you are either unable or unwilling to immerse yourself in a deeper way of looking.

I'm going to quote Jed Perl here: "the more an artist asks us to look at a work over a period of time, the more a work drops beneath the radar screens that criticism has set up to track the contemporary scene."

I have the highest standards for my paintings. I mean every single brush stroke. I've been a painter my whole life; I taught at Duke for years and at the Corcoran.

I know what I'm talking about. My hope is that you'll think about what I'm saying and take another look.

Sheila Blake