photo
by Kenny Braun
Lance
Letscher has more than buzz going on; he has mystique workin', too.
The buzz comes from Letscher's art: poetic collages concocted from
"found" papers – album covers, books, handwritten recipes,
notes, and magazine clippings among them – which are meticulously
cut and arranged into intriguing patterns and textures that open
up worlds of thoughts and associations. It's part of what's led
the Austin-born and -bred artist to have two shows up in town simultaneously:
"Books and Parts of Books: 1996-2004," a traveling survey
at the Austin Museum of Art, and "Provisional Beauty"
at D Berman Gallery. The pairing is brilliant: One can see and trace
the artist's progress – and wonder where it will go next, as Letscher
is barely in midcareer.
The
mystique – a mixture of mystery and reverence – is that of a reticent,
reclusive artist. Letscher generates mystery simply by being himself:
a low-key, quiet person who lets his art do the talking for him,
unless you ask him a direct question. Then he answers thoughtfully
and thoroughly but without letting his focus wander. That focus
is a key component of his idiosyncratic work, which started earning
reverence, or respect, from the moment it first made a splash in
the Texas art world as meticulous and fragile sculpture. Then, and
ever since, Letscher has worked on his art assiduously, even while
holding down other jobs and raising a family. Those years may have
limited the amount of work he was able to send out into the world,
but that added to the mystique. These days, Letscher's shows are
a sea of red dots – the art world's discreet "sold" sign.
Thanks
to those red dots, Letscher has been able to work full time on his
art for the past three years. Daily he travels from his home in
Central Austin to his studio in a two-story addition that juts out
into his back yard. The bright, uncluttered work space has gauzy
curtains that soften the sunlight and allow glimpses of a field
of green lawn, as well as trees and leaves just a touch away. Inside,
massive worktables line the walls, with books and magazines in stacks
and boxes tucked underneath. These piles of future fodder are Letscher's
archives, sitting in shadow, awaiting their turn to come into play
on the light-table tops above. There, Letscher culls the chaos by
sorting and selecting, cutting, slicing, and arranging the pieces
into collages that have a precision akin to microscopic focus. Letscher
only includes the essential; there is nothing extraneous.
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Drawn to Paper
"Books and Parts of Books" catches Letscher in midstream.
He was just out of graduate school in the late 1980s when the Dallas
art scene took notice of his small sculptures. Unfortunately, they
took an extraordinary amount of time to make, and without the luxury
of time that grad school provides, just creating new pieces became
a challenge. And though they were quite heavy, they were also fragile.
Galleries were reluctant to handle Letscher's work. By the early
Nineties, he had reached "a critical mass of frustration"
with the situation, so while working three jobs, Letscher started
making "simple, small drawings to work through ideas – cutting
them out and superimposing one upon another to get more density
and depth. That's how the collages started," he says.
Works relating to those first efforts – delicate landscape drawings
with collage elements – can be seen at AMOA. These are reminiscent
of an Asian sensibility, evoking the vastness of nature in a spare
drawing of a single tree carefully placed on a monochromatic ground.
Drawing
has always been a part of Letscher's life. His mother, who preceded
Lance to UT art school, gave her kids art supplies for their birthdays
and for Christmas. Letscher remembers that making art was "a
foundational element of my personality." At UT, Letscher found
the medium of printmaking to be a natural extension for his drawing
skills, and through it he developed his understanding of color,
particularly "color harmonies, mixing, and balance."
Long
Life
After
graduation, Letscher worked for Amado Peña, an artist known
for his Southwestern-style prints. This put Letscher in a master-apprentice
workshop situation, which was for him an invaluable learning experience,
in both applying color and watching a commercially successful artist
at work in the world. "There is a definite art to marketing
your work and presenting yourself in a professional way," says
Letscher. "A lot of artists have a romantic or bohemian attitude
to their work. It may work in the studio, but it doesn't work when
approaching galleries." Letscher now has work in about 10 galleries,
stretching from San Francisco to Albuquerque, New York to Munich.
Letscher
credits his time with Peña with teaching him how to navigate
the commercial steps to success. Early on, he committed to gallery
affiliations in Dallas and Houston, and after a number of years,
this led to notice by the Howard Scott Gallery in NYC. That's when
his work really began to take off, although the artist himself cannot
parse out the precise reasons for his success. Showing in New York
at a good gallery that published a small catalog just put his work
at "the next level," where it began receiving critical
attention.
Letscher
notes, however, that the work itself also changed at that point,
which is what makes it hard for him to identify exactly why his
sales changed. He did notice that the buzz got louder because of
his sold-out New York show and that "more people buy because
things are happening" in the artist's career.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Patterns
If we let the buzz take over, it's easy to lose sight of the fact
that there would be no buzz without the art. Watching the work change
and grow and develop is one of the pleasures of seeing Letscher's
current shows in tandem. In time, his elegant drawings developed
into much more colorful abstract works, rich in complexity and texture.
He became interested in pattern and pattern-based structures, often
reminiscent of quilts, which were part of Letscher's inspiration.
He was attracted to "the parallel [between] fabric design and
quilt making – [it was] handmade and expressive but anonymous and
utilitarian. I like that aesthetic, the modesty in that.
"When something is designed as a utilitarian object, decisions
are made in its construction that give it a voice – what fabrics
are available – and I am trying to invest the work with a structure
that has an underlying logic of craft that is expressive of something
else: a personal and intimate experience in making it," reflects
the artist. "It is an intuition I have; it is not completely
conscious."
photo
by Kenny Braun
And
there is an integrity to Letscher's materials. He uses "found"
paper, art-world shorthand for materials that were created for another
purpose and often were manufactured. In Letscher's case, "retrieved"
paper is more specific to his process. He collects and is given
discarded objects of a certain age: books, LPs, typefaces, handwritten
pages full of notes, lists, recipes, letters – many of them from
commercially printed sources and reflecting the popular culture
of their time. Letscher considers these materials his palette, the
base source from which he weaves his spell. As with quilts, it may
be the familiarity of the materials that adds to his work's broad
appeal.
More
recently, the artist finds himself rooted in color, though not in
the typical, painterly sense. "I've been trying to have color
carry the emotional atmosphere," he says. "I would like
to make things that are mysteriously powerful. I'd like to make
a nonconscious communication that people feel and can't put their
fingers on." Letscher wants his work to work for people who
are not indoctrinated into art; he wants to reach people who are
not in the art world, "everyday people – those are the people
I want to impress."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Down the Memory Hole
Given Letscher's track record, it's clear that his work impresses
many people. Clearly, it appeals to people who love detail, who
love to connect the dots and free associate, to read things into
the work. It offers them many layers, each containing different
aspects of the artist's personality, and the closer they get to
it, the more rewards the work delivers. In Modern Farmer, now on
view at D Berman Gallery, multicolored ovals hover atop a magazine
cover, but one cream-colored paper oval is carefully cut so these
words can be read:
"Help Session
photo by Kenny Braun
MWF
2-5pm
Room
225 A"
Read
into that what you will; Letscher's humor sneaks up on you.
Que
is a simple and profound piece composed of large and small vertical
rectangles linked together in pairs by a thin black line. They are
arranged on a tea-colored ground and function almost as a set of
notes. This piece creates synesthesia – just by looking at it, the
piece generates a recollection of resonant sound in me.
photo by Kenny Braun
Angular
Landscape, on the other hand, is purely abstract. The blocks of
greens and reds and earth colors jostling one another are like bedrock
undergoing enormous change – cracking, swaying, quaking – yet not
falling into chaos. Instead, they are still constructive building
blocks, actively rearranging themselves beneath our feet. In a way,
this piece depicts the artist in relation to his buzzing audience:
Letscher is the bedrock, constantly morphing into new forms, while
viewers delight in seeing and participating in what was once hidden,
out of sight and out of mind.
This
sense of a life force in action is inherent in working with paper.
It is a medium that breathes; it bends and curls or stiffens, responding
to changes in the air, its temperature and humidity. That the paper
he uses is from a time past is another key to the artist's sensibility.
Letscher doesn't belong to our fast and furious, go-ahead, get-ahead
world. It is not just that his work refers to an earlier, more grounded
era; the stream he connects with seems timeless.
Letscher's
artwork is a heady mix of instinct, thought, play, and deep feelings.
His intriguing images activate the reflective in viewers, who connect
to their own feelings and memories, perhaps even more than to the
delight in the eye-catching colors, patterns, and textures that
formally compose the works. This ability to send viewers on memory
trips is key to Letscher's success and a reason why many of his
admirers have purchased more than one Letscher work.
In the
end, buzz around an artist comes and goes, and mystique fades over
time. But once it leaves the studio, art lives a life of its own.
Obviously, Letscher's work appeals to something deep in people that
makes them want to have the objects he makes in their everyday lives.
When asked what he thinks interests people in his work, the artist
says simply, "The one thing that people respond to is the human
element."
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"Books
and Parts of Books: 1996-2004" runs through Aug. 29 at the
Austin Museum of Art, 823 Congress, "Provisional Beauty"
runs through July 3 at D Berman Gallery, 1701 Guadalupe.
'Books
and Parts of Books: 1996-2004'
Austin Museum of Art Downtown, through Aug. 29
BY MOLLY BETH BRENNER
Red Bar
Since its inception, collage has thrived in the corners of the art
world. From scrapbook pages to fine artworks, thoughtfully constructed
mélanges of odds and ends so often turn out worlds greater
than the sum of their parts, visually and conceptually. This is
especially true of the work of Lance Letscher, an Austin artist
whose creations, made with bits of old books, handwritten letters,
ledgers, and other manuscripts, garner international acclaim.
For me, Letscher's art is reminiscent of no other artist's. It is
eminently identifiable, deeply stamped with his unique process and
style. This does not mean that all his pieces look the same; on
the contrary, his current retrospective at the Austin Museum of
Art is exciting in its breadth and diversity, even within the narrow
subheading of "Lance Letscher's collage made with found text
after 1996." Using variation of hue, texture, and media, Letscher
manages to test the boundaries of the highly specific materials
and methods with which he is so closely identified.
Because Letscher's collages are made of found text media, they are
bound by the limits of those materials. This is immediately apparent
in the aged color palettes of Letscher's work: These are, in the
words of the show's curator, "the colors of the past."
What's surprising, though, is that through Letscher's outstanding
craft, these colors are placed in contexts that lead to new and
unusual readings of them. In The Sun, a pencil and found-paper piece,
the artist has arranged tiny paper diamonds, aged to different hues
of gray-yellow, in a radiating pattern of gradating hues. The bits
work together to create a sunburst with all the dynamism of a brightly-colored
painting, but here the sense of movement is created by the careful
arrangement of the papers, not any hint of bright color. Taken separately,
each shard of dull gray is a useless scrap; together, they create
the illusion of intense radiation.
Letscher's most familiar pieces are more gaily colored, often featuring
pinwheel patterns and series of colored strips, bits of text (handwritten
and printed), and nostalgic wallpaperlike patterns. These are the
artworks that keep on giving: Depending on your perspective, your
distance from the piece, and even your height, they reveal a different
combination of treasures at each glance. The 4-foot-long Red Bar
is a huge array of tiny, multihued bits of cardboard arranged in
columns, with chunks of random-seeming found text ("longevity!,"
"London time," "bats") embedded in its indexlike
corpus. I walked by it several times, both at close range and from
a distance, and each time my mind registered wildly different imprints
from the piece's miniature stimulations. It's like an art Rorschach;
many of Letscher's collages in this style offer this sort of open-ended,
continuous conversation. It's no wonder that they're such favorites
of collectors.
The numerous faces of Letscher's collage art are visible in AMOA's
show, from his series of thickly built-up, industrially stapled
landscapes to his more representative figures of book-cover trees
and honeycomb skies to his pieces that rely more strongly on drawing
for their impact. Each family of work deserves its own commentary,
though there's not enough space here to allow for it. Perhaps the
most satisfying aspect of the show, though, is the sense of possibility
that's derived from witnessing such a specialized art niche unfold
into countless forms and patterns, like the fanning out of freshly
cut paper chains.
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