My friend, Sean Kennedy, recently wrote about my paintings on his blog on MySpace. What he said is closer to what I feel about my work than anything else I’ve read. Sean should know. He has several of my paintings in his home instead of a TV and he watches them change with the changing light throughout the day (and night). I was so impressed with what he wrote that I asked him if I could reprint it here;
Every Leya Evelyn painting carries a wound. A wound that, in turn, carries the painting. Often they are vaginal. Sartre, giving full rein to his misogyny and resentment of the female form, described the vagina as obscene, a gaping hole, "an appeal to being". His sense was that the vagina, like any gaping space, an open mouth at Burger King, demanded to be filled, satiated, and, by the same token, contained. If he was, perhaps, wrong in most of what he said in this, one thing rings true in the current instance. The idea of the wound as an appeal.In the case of Leya Evelyn's canvasses, there is no shouting, no hysteria, and certainly nothing of Sartre's all-too-easy misogynistic philosophy. But each painting carries a wound. And the wound is an appeal to being. A muted scream. When you first see one, all you can see is the scream, the difficult corner that will not go away. After a while, when the painting has agreed to be around you, the scream is the place you return to again and again. Like a tongue to a jagged tooth.
To try and explain how and why Leya Evelyn's art articulates any or all of this is not so much to mix metaphors as to simply intrude verbally upon a process that is written in, or on, or by and through the body. Samuel Beckett never got over the fact that he had to work with words, and all of their sullied etymological history, when his friends, Jack Yeats or John Beckett, could draw on the purer medium of the note or the brushstroke. These seemed cleaner to him, whereas words carried everything with them. Hoarders of hurt and history both. "I love you". Like putting your heart into a left luggage locker in Kings X and expecting it to be found by your intended. "I love you too".
Of course, wounds are everywhere. But nowhere more beautifully transposed than in Leya's canvasses. They don't just scream, they also sing. Sometimes they sigh. Often, they say nothing at all. They are, in fact, nothing more or less than ourselves. Hurt, hopeful, beautiful, and in search of redemption. Or, to use Leya's own word, resolution.
Not resolution in the sense of a neat and fitting end. Not solution. More like resolution as in the strength to go on, the resolve to continue. Courage. The courage, perhaps, not to lick our wounds so much as hear them out.