DIANE LEVESQUE
Painted crockery, toys, clown faces, plastic body parts, and carpenter’s squares appear in several of the paintings, and at least three depict a mirror or some other reflecting surface. In There Are No Bad Guns, which is filled with guns and gun-related images, a garden globe reflects houses with TV antennas across the street from the still life, and in The Noisy Body the surface of a metallic roly-poly clown seems to reflect the painter and a landscape. These images in mirrors are a quote from Dutch still life, genre, and portrait painting; Levesque seems to point to her origins in that tradition, which in part celebrated the objects and bounty of middle-class life and was not infrequently practiced by women. But though her technique is assured and deft, she’s not concerned with representing surfaces the way the northern painters were, and her disorderly piles of objects would alarm a meticulous housewife of any period. She uses paint in a descriptive, slightly expressionistic manner: she doesn’t distort the images but uses color to provide dissonance, movement, and excitement.
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One of the small oils on panel doesn’t have the physical presence of The Chrysalis but extends and refines the theme of the mother’s body. The God Wrestler portrays a woman on her hands and knees; her swollen breasts, with painful-looking bright red nipples, are suspended over a white crockery bowl presumably there to catch the milk. It’s hard to make out the woman’s expression because her face is in profile and shaded, but she seems to be frowning or straining, in contrast to the concentration of the woman in The Chrysalis. On her back is a Kool-Aid jug or something similar with a face, and inside the sweating jug is a Madonna. Both Madonna and woman are dressed in blue, the woman in what might be jeans (though her breasts are bare) and the Madonna in robes. She is smiling serenely as Madonnas do, her hands delicately folded and her hair falling gracefully along her shoulders. But the woman herself once again conveys the sense of ungainly physical labor, of the pressure of milk in one’s breasts, not to mention carrying things on one’s back–all conventional associations of motherhood: meaning conferred by objects. The face on the Kool-Aid jug is grimacing here, unlike those on the actual jugs; and the holy mother, who doesn’t seem involved in the physicality of motherhood, is both unreachable and burdensome. As in most of the paintings, the woman and her things occupy a shallow, almost theaterlike space at the edge of the ocean, here a beach with sand castles and sand drawings. Levesque uses a smaller brush in the oil-on-panel paintings–but they’re equally facile and assured, and loaded with color.
