artist work

LES SEIFER

Paintings

EXHIBITION DATES:

Friday July 10 thru Thursday July 16 2009

Opening reception Friday July 10 7-9pm

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"Seifer's passion for painting often shows up on canvases that relate directly of "Old Brooklyn” industrial sites, wharfs and neighborhoods. He strives to move away from figuration and more toward blocks of color in work that may include line drawings which could indicate a road, rail tract, fence or telephone wires.”

Hungry Hyaena Blog
2009
Les Seifer's mixed media paintings evidence a playful disregard for the conventions of painting. The interactions and proclivities of Seifer's varied media inform the pictures' making; as a result, the paintings include unexpected compositional and color choices, even as they manifest the artist's formal command.

Atmospheric and often gritty, the pictures also reflect the striking (and similarily unconventional) juxtaposition of past and future in urban settings. The layered imagery of Seifer's works is partially rendered or scrubbed out, a lost and found architecture of our evolving cultural landscape.

A native New Yorker, Seifer is clearly inspired by the diversity and mutability of the City's outer boroughs, but his saturated, pooling colors and hodgepodge approach evoke a less specific sense of nostalgia, one that is universally understood. Even the darkest or most anxious of Seifer's works celebrates human imagination and potential; his pictures are dreamlike and fundamentally optimistic, poetic records of our increasingly plural mythos.



 

Les Seifer is originally from Westchester County, New York but now lives in Brooklyn where his passion for painting often shows up on canvases that relate directly to 'Old Brooklyn' industrial sites, wharfs, and neighborhoods. A graduate of Syracuse University with a degree in Art, Les has dedicated himself to a career in painting. He has representation in New York City and Provincetown and his work is in the collection of private individuals in the USA and Europe.

Les's work is well thought out and deliberate. He spends a great deal of time internalizing images he wishes to produce on canvas and frees himself to express each piece individually. This process can take a long period of time, usually months, before completion. He speaks openly about the process and says,"It isn't so much that I labor over [these paintings] continuously: rather I tend to see new things and my instincts tell me different paths to follow from week to week. I'm letting time contribute to them."

His uses oil paint, acrylic paint, charcoal, lacquer-based inks, cut paper collage on paper, canvas or Masonite. With this mix of mediums he creates vibrant paintings that engage the viewer and tell a story. He continues to play with vibrant color to create collage/paintings of mixed media that exude a high degree of accuracy and an eye that looks onward to endless development. Les uses geometrical imagery by juxtaposing triangles, rectangles and squares in his work and there will be the occasional person, bird or horses that will appear in his images. He says of his own work, "I think [my] work is much more figurative than the past couple of years, though I still walk that line between figuration and abstraction. I would say that line has shifted slightly back towards figuration this year, with birds, and horses and even people popping up here and there.", all of which adds to the three dimensionality of his work.

ERNDEN FINE ART GALLERY is pleased to represent Les Seifer. For more information on Les Seifer's work please contact Dennis Costin, Gallery Director at 508-487-6700 or 888-304-ARTS or via email www.erndengallery@att.net .