![]() While we might not be able to categorize these works as photographs anymore, I think there is an important lesson about using new software tools with intention here. Portraits of Miss Wonderly (from Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon) and Johnny Perry (from Chester Himes mysteries) are surrounded by tiny background details, some as clues to their personalities or backstories, others as stripes, planes, and slabs of color laid in with obvious paint program shadowing or software twisting. Hair is nearly always drawn in strand by strand with gestural computer crispness instead of the silky body and shape we might expect. Don Perlimplin (from Federico Garcia Lorca’s play) functions in the same way – penetrating eyes, but earrings that are flat circles and a shirt and sash that sit on top with a disrupting lack of depth. Aging fingers grasp a cream colored fedora made of arcs of color, his white boutonniere a splash of computer perfect whiteness. Gustav von Aschenbach (from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice) placidly sits in a chair, his balding head plausibly real, but his stubble laid in with black dots. These contrasts give the portraits an almost puzzling vitality. Often the rest of the likeness is roughed in with simpler shapes, a shirt collar or ribbon made of a flat color block, or papers held within fingers as abstract rectangles. ![]() Skin shines, fingers curl, and eyes peer out with appropriate tactile blurs and smoothness. Leslie’s interpretive portraits nearly always place primary attention on faces and hands, his painting skills giving these areas an eerie sense of reality. Areas of hyper real (nearly photographic) drawing are combined with sections of blunt placeholder flatness, the compositions oscillating between detail and digital cutout, representation and mere symbolic intention. Leslie’s images function in the same manner. When reading a description of a tragic hero, a leading lady, or a flashy secondary character in a famous novel, the words often highlight certain physical characteristics (the turn of a nose, the color of the hair, the look of the eyes, the angle of a hat), leaving the rest of the details to be filled in by the reader’s mind. What’s truly fascinating about these pictures is the way they mimic the pathways of imagination. Leslie’s newest works find him extending this unique artistic vocabulary, applying his new methods to the portraits of various literary characters. ![]() Not exactly an obvious move for a successful 80+ year old artist, but one that delivered some unorthodox outcomes – here we had a painter (instead of a photographer) wrangling the controls of Photoshop, and his approach to image construction led to some unexpected visual motifs. Comments/Context: Several years ago, the well known painter and filmmaker Alfred Leslie shocked us all by picking up a tablet computer and making hand crafted digital images that pushed the definitional boundaries of both painting and photography.
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