The DU Lounge
Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsHughie Lee-Smith, Black painter 1950s
1915 to 1999
My earliest direct contact with painting was . . . as a ten-year-old student at the Cleveland Museum. The specific painting that made an impression was Ryders Death Riding the Race Track. My early attraction to that macabre composition suggests a natural propensity to a romantic perception of reality. . . . In addition to this, in later years I have come to realize the unconscious influence of the Midwestern climate as a key factor in the development of my colour scheme. My predilection for cold, dark skies and sparse, flat landscapes in my painting is undoubtedly due in large measure to the long, continuously grey winters of my youth in Ohio, Michigan and Ontario.
https://www.michaelrosenfeldart.com/artists/hughie-lee-smith-1915-1999
frazzled
(18,402 posts)Hughie Lee-Smiths art conveys the alienation and isolation experienced by many African Americans during the middle decades of the twentieth century, yet his work speaks in larger terms about our inability to reach out and connect with others on grounds larger than race. Although Lee-Smith was a direct contemporary of Jacob Lawrence, his art followed a different trajectory, adopting an approach to realism inflected by the sense of isolation and alienation in Edward Hoppers work, and by the surrealistic tendencies of Giorgio di Chirico. That surrealistic edge to his work intensifies the emotional distance conveyed by the people in his paintings.
Over a sixty-year career, Lee-Smith explored psychological corners of the human experience grounded in separation and displacement. As the artist remarked about his work, I think my paintings have to do with an invisible lifea reality on a different level. In The Beach, a young woman holds a small child as a strong wind buffets her body and sweeps across the sand. She seems lost in the close contact with her child, while the limitless sky and sea speak to the larger universe around her, of which she seems unaware.
https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/beach-78131
Beringia
(4,316 posts)FM123
(10,053 posts)blm
(113,039 posts)Cleveland has one of the finest art collections in the world. The school system there encouraged art and music education. There were regular field trips scheduled to expose students to the fine arts and to the Cleveland Orchestra, which was also viewed for decades as one of the finest orchestras in the world.
MLAA
(17,266 posts)Thank you for sharing them. I feel richer for having seen them. What talent.
I love the tall, elongated figures in the midst of the mid western landscape and weather he describes. The figures look simply and complicated all at the same time.
Response to Beringia (Original post)
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