SHEILA LANHAM: WORLD VIEWS

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The range of aesthetic affinities available for creative inspiration is evident in the ‘World View’ paintings of Sheila Lanham, which was originally influenced by the images of landscapes from a 1967 World Book Encyclopedia. A studious imagination discovered these images, initially, one can only surmise, in the act of perusing an educational or informational resource for other purposes. Lanham is also a published poet, so one may easily assume she was ranging in various sources for facts describing real people, places, and things. The creative imagination may know no bounds, yet it sometimes must rely upon sources such as an encyclopedia in order to originate the matter that fills poems and paintings alike. Not everything can arise from past sensory experience, but may also be generated from the mind’s engagement with new facts.

This search for facts led Lanham to the pictures illustrating the matter-of-fact texts. From her exposure to these images, and making a specific study of them, even going so far as to excise them from the volumes themselves, and collect them to form unique collages, Lanham was on her way to reinventing their role. Such mass-produced images in old printed volumes were anything but ideal. Yet their inadequacies must have suggested a certain amorphousness that gave way to ideas about place, about how ideas can take root in the mind when confronted with less-than-ideal sources. Facts can be suggested and bloom into ideas of beauty when that’s all that left to us to fill in the blanks. It's in this context that Lanham’s World View series was born. What resulted was a series of painted t that combine a collage structure with silhouettes suggestive of wild life—animals or birds, or of —that altogether are depicted upon an atmospheric background that accentuates the psychological space of the overall picture. These kaleidoscopic totems present as demigods of alternating passages, each a choice for where to exist, now and in the future.

I invite you to explore the universe animated by these paintings. It is distinct yet expansive. Perhaps you will return to peruse it often, or perhaps you may wish to take a piece of it home with you. All inquiries are welcome. “Sheila Lanham: World Views” is on view through April 7, 2022..

David Gibson, Gibson Contemporary, New York, NY