Roots, Stones and Baggage

Richard Brown Lethem (b. 1932) has been living and thinking in paint on canvas since the 1950s, with results that have been categorized, more or less aptly, as abstraction, expressionism, figuration, social realism, surrealism, and allegory. Now in his 90s, Lethem's imagery has become unified and direct, often consisting of a central form derived from nature, yet distilled, by the visionary pressure of his attention, into symbols seemingly directly drawn from his psychic landscape, and beamed into that of the viewer. If this is an example of "late style," it is one defiantly uninterested in a modest contemplation of mortality; instead, the painter's wisdom exalts an embrace of color and sensuality, and traces the joyous mystery of our consistent presence as neighboring bodies in a shared field of space. He has written poetry since the 1950s to the present.