In his second show of paintings at the Lyons-Wier Gallery, Hank Feeley depicts richly colored, impastoed figures in settings that are compositionally and technically strong and lead the viewer to question certain everyday practices.
In all but one of the oils exhibited, Feeley places his characters, primarily men in business suits, in active poses around tables to suggest serious meetings. They sit, stand, hide their faces, rub their eyes, struggle with decisions. Outside the rooms, he brings to life of cities, mountains, monuments, cemeteries. At the center of each painting is a puppet, doll or clown, or sometimes a photograph of one of those figures, which represents a product the executives are deciding how best to promote.
“I’ve tried to convey the idea that what they’re doing may seem serious, but by using a doll I’m trying to make the point that the meetings are quite ludicrous,” said Feeley, whose choice of titles emphasizes his message. The meeting scene where Venice is pictured in the background is titled “Last Meeting of the Merchants of Greed and Corruption.”
In “Midnight in the Garden of the Witless Buzzing Insect,” the frustration of those attending is enforced by the lateness of the meeting, emphasized by the darkness outside and glow of the moon. The choice of placing the meeting room adjacent to a cemetery emphasizes Feeley’s belief that such meetings and commercial ventures have no lasting importance for mankind other than to line their individual and corporate wallets. In the one picture where a meeting does not take place, a sole figure portrayed in a gypsylike guise represents the puppet master who ultimately orchestrates all meetings.
Feeley is no stranger to meetings. Before devoting himself to painting full time in 1993, he worked at an advertising agency for 28 years, retiring as a vice chairman in charge of client marketing. Though he painted and drew since childhood and studied art in college, Feeley never pursued art professionally until he retired and started attending classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. He eventually decided to complete his degree.
Among the artists Feeley admires and whose influences can be seen in his work are Edward Hopper, for his subtle use of light and shadow and a sense of place, and Max Beckmann and other German Expressionists, for their incorporation of grotesque beings in scenes meant to question many acts of supposedly civilized man. The show can be seen through Feb. 7 at 300 W. Superior St.
Another strong figurative painter, Margaret Lazzari, who was born in St. Louis, moved to Texas and then relocated to Los Angeles 12 years ago, places her attractive figures sometimes alone and sometimes in small groups and often in bodies of water in her show of paintings and pastels titled “Floating” at Gwenda Jay Gallery.
Like Feeley’s, Lazzari’s subjects were influenced by what she saw around her — “beautiful bodies made more beautiful by working out or through plastic surgery and by a huge homeless population whose bodies over time degenerate, become sick and diseased,” she explains.
Such transformations can be startling and disturbing. But instead of giving her subjects a contemporary look about them or placing them in a readily identifiable modern-day setting, Lazzari offers viewers an unusual juxtaposition. In both her oils atop canvas and watercolors and pastels atop paper, she gives her somewhat realistic subjects, both adults and children, a romantic richness characteristic of Renaissance painters such as Titian and Tiepolo. She then suggests a spiritual sense of suspension by placing around them an abstract body of water that she illuminates with a strong, richly colored glow.
Little occurs in almost all the works. Even when a group or family is painted — and several works depict the artist’s husband and young daughter — no one is talking, interacting or doing much of anything except immersing themselves in the water. In “Dissolve,” the young child’s arms and legs are stretched out as though she had been running, yet at the particular moment when she is depicted, she seems stopped dead in her tracks.
Death inspired many of the works, Lazzari says. “Each person goes through a transformation over the course of their life. We change, mature and grow on our own. Even though we may be part of a family, we essentially are alone in this life and exist as solitary characters.”
She chooses water to emphasize this ebb and flow because it is a physical element that we constantly come into contact with. The most appealing works in the show are not the large single, diptychs or triptychs, but the very small, extremely intimate canvases. The show continues at 704 N. Wells St. through Feb. 10.