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Carpe Flores Robert Lemay and 30 years of redeeming floral still life WORDS BY JOE GURBA
If you are dismissive of still life painting because you find it too virtuosic, too technique driven, or perhaps too toothless, please consider the thirty year oeuvre of Edmonton based painter Robert Lemay. Lemay’s work has been exhibited in Montréal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, New York, Milan, and London, and appears in collections around the globe, even adorning our Canadian embassies from Beijing to Canberra. Lemay’s debt to the old masters is unquestionable and readily admitted. At first glance, Lemay’s work is clearly in conversation with northern renaissance Dutch and Flemish still lifes of the 16th-17th century, paintings he ardently admires, but the distinctions in his approach are myriad. With clear reference to our digital age, Lemay’s process begins with photographing his flowers. He then renders that photo to the canvas by painting square by square on a linear grid, mimicking pixelation. Over thirty years, it appears those pixels have gained in fidelity in tandem with the advances in photographic and on-screen resolution. These are all intelligently subtle developments in still life, but the way the subject is framed provides the most crucial departure from classical painting. The cropped, photographic composition catapults the viewer from their art history textbook to the 21st century, especially when magnified to several square feet of canvas. ▶
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