Gabriel Lehman
Gabriel and Jamie Lehman at this year’s Indiana Artisans show in Indianapolis. photo by Bob Gustin
~by Bob Gustin
O
ne recent autumn day, Gabriel Lehman walked outside his rural Brown County home and looked up to enjoy the big blue sky. He noticed the details around him, like the plentiful nut harvest, and the squirrels making great leaps from treetop to treetop. Then he thought, “What if squirrels could really fly, and could be harnessed and saddled and taken for a trip?” In Gabriel’s world, that’s possible. Even as a boy, playing in the woods and farmland near Elkhart, picking apples, fishing in the creek and running with a herd of friends, his artistic imagination ran wild. “I liked paper airplanes, of course,” he said. “But I wanted to ride in them. Who wouldn’t?” Now 42 and an illustrative surrealist of note, Lehman has made Brown County his home as he celebrates 10 years of painting. He and his wife Jamie live at Cordry-Sweetwater Lake, where he paints his colorful fanciful portraits of a world of his own creation. Gabriel’s world has its own rules. Gravity works just like it does on earth. The color palette is limited. But there’s no electricity, no internal combustion engines, and modes of transportation are powered by nature, animals, people and their creations. Size is relative. Characters include Gabriel, Jamie, and his son Connor, a student at Brown County High
38 Our Brown County • May/June 2019
School. In Gabriel’s world, Jamie is a little girl who wants to explore, but her parents want her to be proper, like a ballerina. She has a patchwork elephant which is sometimes big enough to ride away on, sometimes small if it needs to hide. His favorite artists are Rene Magritte and Dr. Seuss, and influences of both can be seen in Gabriel’s work, usually acrylic on canvas. A childhood portion of Looney Tunes is also apparent. “I want to celebrate the joviality and innocence and sense of wonder children have,” he said. The Lehmans came to Brown County about two years ago from the Greenwood area, where Gabriel worked construction and installed carpets. Examining his life, he thought hard about what his purpose and his passions were. “I couldn’t say carpet was it,” he said. But his carpet career was not without its positives. Gabriel said the work helped hone his attention to detail and sense of precision. Gabriel and Jamie chose to live in Brown County because both are outdoorsy people, and they were searching for a place they could be happy and spend the rest of their days. An art studio is in their long-term plans.
