Kristina Leskel
Nantucket Map No. 2
Oil on Canvas
42" x 60"
As an art gallery owner it’s always a refreshing treat to introduce new artists to my gallery and I am particularly pleased to be showing Kristina Leskel‘s Map paintings. It would be an over simplification to suggest that Kristina’s paintings fell into that narrow rather parochial theme that usually accompanies the work of local artists whether it be here on Nantucket or any other small community of local artists. The kind of art that Kristina produces has a long and quite amazing history. Although pleasingly she doesn’t know it an artist whose works Kristina closely resembles both in quality and content is that of the English painter Alfred Wallace (1855-1942).
Rather shamefully in his lifetime Alfred Wallace was a primarily regarded as a Cornish fisherman who just happened to paint. His paintings were largely ignored as the idle dabblings of a bored and retired seafarer looking for something to do to keep him himself occupied. His works now are fiercely collected and sell for huge sums. Alfred Wallace’s paintings are not easily categorized but to suggest they were maps that accurately charted the coastline, coves and harbours of the Cornish waters he fished will suffice for our purposes here. Wallace brought to his paintings a tremendous insiders knowledge of his local area. His paintings depict in what might term a naive but accurate way local incidents that as a mariner he paid immediate witness to. His painting of the freighter Blue Jacket rather embarrassingly ashore on the rocks beneath the Longships Lighthouse off the Cornish coast immediately springs to mind!. For one so young Kristina’s paintings are incredibly mature. Her work depicts scenes of Nantucket that have long since vanished but kept alive in our minds the fact they are depicted in her art. Maps by their very nature have to be accurate and no matter what quirks and eccentricities their makers might introduce everything depicted within them has to be in their right place in order for them to be considered valid and contextual. Take as an instance the shipwrecks under Sankaty lighthouse depicted in “Nantucket map No2“, surely if a ship were to be wrecked it could find no more noble place than on the wild, windswept and open shores of Sconset. What a shame it would be to sink in the calm and idle waters of the harbour!
All this said Kristina Leskel’s paintings are contemporary and stand on their own as quite beautiful, fun and lyrical works of art. I love her textures and the glazes she utilizes; her mature pallet along with the incidents of bright red give her work that little extra spark and bring her paintings truly to life…terrific!
Paul Copson.
Thomas Henry Gallery, July 2008
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