ALLUSIVE ABSTRACTIONS

The subtlety with which Luc Leestemaker paints has taken a recent turn from opaque layering to an almost transcendent combination of implied atmospheric depth and kinetic muscularity. Whereas his earlier "Inner Landscapes" held an implied horizon line, these newest paintings seem to describe the cloudy depths of skyscapes as well as the uncertain nature of human perception.

The feeling is almost baroque in its sense of effusiveness, movement and rhythm. Yet stylistically these newest works are still primarily abstractions only allusively describing subject. We read "landscape" into this work as we do in his paintings from 1998 and earlier, perhaps because of our innate desire to see something with which we can be familiar and comfortable.

But these new works are perhaps even more challenging than his previous metaphoric canvasses of sky–horizon–land because of Leestemaker’s layered application of paint in translucent-seeming, illusory "veils." Here he evokes a sense of immaterial impermanence and refraction. It is almost as if light is absorbed by these cloudy textures and then illuminated even more forcefully back at us. We are surprised by this often brilliant luminosity in contrast to the carefully-modulated paint surface and subtly implied forms.

Since Leestemaker’s last exhibition at BGH Gallery, he has gained regional and national attention from collectors both private and corporate for his large single canvasses and multi-paneled paintings. This most recent group of works provides new insights into a maturing talent who has developed a distinctive, rich sensibility in his work.

WILLIAM TORPHY
Critic and Curator
San Francisco

The recent Landscape paintings by Luc Leestemaker are meticulous meditations on the subtler and deeper aspects of seeing. They seem

above all to be about reflection and quietude, but not silence, for a great deal is happening in each vibrant canvas as well as in the entire series seen together.

The deceptive simplicity and naturalness of these inner and outer landscapes gives the work their seductive power: their nonconfrontal, thoughtful character is like a mirror allowing viewers to look inside themselves and give a private meaning to these lonely landscapes.

Leestemaker himself refers to the possible unconscious influence of the flat humid land of his native Holland. The Dutch connection does seem apparent in an allusively indicated straight "horizon line" demarking spaces above and below. The pigment, laid onto the canvas in bold, horizontal strokes of the palette knife (occasionally relieved by the delicate play of brushwork) creates the illusion of spatial atmosphere and glorious luminosity.

The artist’s concern is not primarily pictorial however. Leestemaker underscores a strong conceptual basis in some of the works by juxtaposing them with one another. In these compositions he arranges each individual painting in a group of 12 all together. The result is a larger, more complex work comprising an even greater variety of color and pattern relationships.

In this way, the formal abstract visual elements transform the implied pictorial qualities into a multiplicity of inter-relationships and inner-play. After many years of tackling larger scale paintings, often explosive and energetically confrontational, Leestemaker now lovingly offers these mature, reflective works. These are heroic works, not because of dramatic effects or ambitious scale; they are brave because of their modesty which belies the deep seriousness of their intention.

William Torphy
Critic and Curator

LUC LEESTEMAKER was born in Hilversum, Netherlands in 1957. There he attended the Municipal Lycee and studied journalism, theatre and art. In the later ‘70s, just prior to embarking on a painting career, he established a performing arts center in Amsterdam which, like his subsequent collective, "Hart Poetry," a group of European artists, musicians and writers, toured with their exhibitions and performances throughout Europe. Ever entrepreneurial, before moving to Los Angeles in 1990 to focus on painting and work as an actor, he formed his own art consulting business for which he edited a monthly magazine linking art and culture to the business community. With such an extensive, diversified background, he arrived in America poised to proceed with his work on a grander scale.

Leestemaker whose grandfather was a painter, first discovered art at age 16. Having grown up in the rigorously exacting contraints of Calvinism he feels a responsibility to bring vibrancy, color and delight into the world. And he very capably fulfilled this sense of obligation in his large-scale earlier pieces. Acrylic and cement on canvas they were energetically explosive abstractions. By contrast, the latest pieces, "Inner Landscapes", embody essences of the flat countryside of his native Holland, which is conceptually translocated on 12 x 9 canvases. The paint, applied with a palette knife and some brushwork in bold horizontal format, translates to a serene realism that is reduced and simplified to the point of abstraction. A translucent film seems to separate the true image from the surface plane creating a distantly misty and meditative aura that encourages viewers to introspect and bring their own meanings to the works. He adds complexity to his compositions through grouping them in series (usually 4 across and in 3 rows) resulting in a greater variety of color and pattern relationships. Such a device brings to mind Monet’s light studies examining a scene at different hours of the day or depicting the wide variety of nature’s mood. Luminous and contemplative each group becomes seductive and non-confrontational finally realizing the artist’s need for joy and beauty.

Luc Leestemaker has accumulated an impressive list of local and international exhibitions including Gagliardi Design and Contemporary Art Gallery, London, England, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Columbia University, New York, and the Boritzer Gray Hamano Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica and he continues to attract the attention of critics and collectors alike.

Norma Jean Squires, Art Critic

Haunting Abstracts Grace Elizabeth Edward’s Walls

Applause goes to a new gallery — Elizabeth Edwards Fine Art Gallery, in the Bluebird Center — that specializes in exemplary contemporary art from the US and Europe. Three of its current artists, Luc Leestemaker, Janet Siegal Rogers, and Father Bill Moore, paint beguiling abstract images.

Leestemaker, a Dutch painter, renders poetic canvasses, which he calls "Transfigurations."

The work is mystical and haunting, a mix of CoBrA and Abstract Expressionism, with shades of his ancestors, the great Dutch landscape painters. Leestemaker’s energetic brushstrokes and intense color are a throwback to CoBrA, where figurative imagery are rendered in an abstracted format.

In the Abstract Expressionist Color Field manner, Leestemaker’s paintings too are gentle and dreamy, with little reference to the known world. Reminiscent of mysterious landscapes, his canvasses reference a horizon line that separates a misty land from a richly clouded sky.

One of Leestemaker’s more engaging work is an ensemble of 12 small canvasses in one painting. Grouped together, the shared energy of the individual art belies the smallness of each size. Leestemaker has made a name for himself. His art is in eminent collections, including Twentieth Century Fox, Bellagio Hotel and Casino, and Miramax Films.

Roberta Carasso
Art Critic, Laguna New-Post

Nantucket Map & Legend

Gallery Pick

-The ethereal landscape paintings of Luc Leestemaker will be exhibited in the show "Transfigurations" at the East East Gallery. Painted directly on the canvas, Leestemaker’s landscapes celebrate the wonder of color and light as they dance between abstraction and realism.-

State of the Arts

Here’s to humidity
By Florrie Ives

When Luc Leestemaker travels east to Nantucket from his current home in California, the painter feels as if he is returning to his native Holland. This sense of familiarity has little to do with the culture, but everything to do with the humidity. Leestemaker soaks in the damp air, vast fields, and gigantic sky of Nantucket that remind him of his Dutch roots.

Leestemaker, whose grandfather was an artist, began painting at age 16. Since coming to America ten years ago, Leestemaker has found himself drawn all the more to his European heritage, both in the artistic influence of the Dutch masters and in his chosen subject of flat, humid landscapes. He may not travel with a camera, but Leestemaker absorbs the soft colors, taking mental pictures to carry back to his Los Angeles studio as inspiration for his paintings.

Leestemaker has been concentrating on landscapes for the past three years. He finds in nature and endless and ever-changing variety of images to reflect upon.

For him the language of the landscape evolves out of very basic elements like color, light, pattern, and space. Through his work he strives to deepen his knowledge of that language while continually exploring his own atmospheric and painterly style. He is not interested in interpreting nature through his painting. Leestemaker is fascinated with the process behind the painting itself as it moves from an abstraction of elements into a more figurative landscape.

Leestemaker uses his canvas as his palette, directly mixing hues with palette knife or brush on the flat surface as he gently draws land and sky out of the abstract splashes of paint. He is careful to stop painting while the image is still rough, before it becomes too solid or perfect. The resulting work is both mysterious and familiar at the same time, reminiscent of a hazy and humid day at the beach or a moist fog creeping in over the moors.

The artist’s upcoming show at the East East gallery is titled "Transfigurations." The exhibit will feature large, single canvas paintings that are neither abstract nor realistic but full of luminous color and freedom of expression. Even with such a contemplative title, Leestemaker says that the show is really about the work itself and the act of painting behind it. "Transfigurations" will be up at the East East Gallery from July 14-28.

ART TALK

BUTTERING BREAD
By Doug Meyer, M.F.A.

As the last decade of the 20th century began so too did the transformation of Luc Leestemaker into a painter of vision and dedication. He left behind him in the Netherlands enviable careers in art education, art publishing and art marketing. He had begun by organizing and staging performances of art and poetry in Amsterdam in the late 1970's, and went on to become a prominent art business consultant. Why then did he walk away from it all and just pick up a paint brush? Was it keen insight or naiveté that led him to believe he could become a successful artist?

What Leestemaker had sensed in himself long before he came to the United States in 1990 was the restless artist within. He has referred to his calling as something simply "genetic". Having a grandfather who painted the Dutch landscape, and a great, great grandfather who did the same had instilled in Leestemaker a sense of artistic tradition, one that he was beginning to feel heir to. He was skeptical but determined to find out if his success and acumen in the business world would somehow translate into another language of endeavor. He decided to follow his passion.

Four years later Leestemaker found himself an intruder in his own studio. The work he saw in there might have pleased his Dutch grandfather but it bore no relevance to his new world. By 1994 he ceased painting altogether, brooding on long nighttime walks in New York's Central Park, wondering if painting was even worth it. Like Gauguin before him he needed to put some miles between himself and the bounds of European culture. Leestemaker 's journey ended in Southern California, the end of the art rainbow, the place where tradition asserts itself mostly as kitsch, and anything five minutes ago is ancient history.

Into this new world of possibilities Leestemaker dove headlong. He appropriately chose Hollywood to begin his new incarnation. Here he could reinvent himself, and he was ready to risk everything. Amidst the cans of paint and blank canvasses, Leestemaker pondered the adventure of painting, not as a heavy burden he had to shoulder, but rather as something pleasurable and gratifying. He decided that he need not follow the old rules because he could create his own. He recognized that the principles of good painting were within him and pleasing himself was the only way to summon forth his full potential as an artist.

As excited as he was over the direction of his art, Leestemaker agonized over his desperate financial situation. He had run up a maximum of debt on his credit cards and was prepared to use his last fivehundred dollars to go back to a safer life. Instead be bought paints, canvas, and brushes, dodged his landlord and began a new body of work that was to change his life.

The painting RETURN OF THE MUSE in 1995 signaled a personal breakthrough for Leestemaker. He let the gestural abstraction of his previous work evolve into forcefully simplistic images. The angst and the struggle of so many years were still apparent, but now the end result was a kind of resolution that was singular and more figural in evocation. In this painting there is a copasetic meeting of oppositional forces. Figure and ground dance around each other and end up coupling in an atmospheric embrace. The hues are subdued and highly tonal, suggesting a somber, moody place in whose center is a suggestion of a spectral figure in profile. A lost-and-found contour of red surrounds a blue and white face. This is clearly a spiritual countenance, the muse Leestemaker had been seeking on his long journey into artistic maturity.

The gestalt hints at a triumphant American optimism in its red, white and blue emerging from a whirlpool of black, earthen red, and blue-gray; colors of an old world whose entropy sought to, but could not draw him back in. The narrative of the expressive brush in pursuit of image was like chasing down and confronting his muse. By balancing the action painting of his earlier work with a new primacy of representation Leestemaker had entered into what he still refers to as his New Period.

The New Period meant for Leestemaker that he was now free to go deep within himself to find relevance in his new world. There is a free and easy interchange between image and abstraction that signaled a new confidence as well. As one looks at the art of Leestemaker from the following year it might appear as if the images were moving into an impressionistic dissolve of brushwork, but the soft focus of these pieces was in fact a shockingly real reaction to the artist's failing eyesight. Leestemaker had bet everything on becoming a painter and now he was having trouble seeing the images he was creating.

During his recovery from eye surgery Leestemaker worked on a series of 12"x 9" canvases.

Their small size was dictated by his limited field of vision. This small scale proved to be providential, especially to Leestemaker's new direction, merging abstraction and image. By merely turning the centralized form of his compositions sideways he arrived at a completely different association. The horizontally bifurcated design now produced landscape references. The muse had dissolved into pure atmosphere. From then until now Leestemaker has been able to chase that muse throughout his psychic landscape following a seemingly unlimited network of gestural and chromatic passages.

When artists reduce their work to a smaller scale, the real estate they work with can become less precious, the air less rarified. There was a new casualness to Leestemaker's approach which signaled a confident artistic maturity. The Inner Landscape series of 1997 unveiled a relaxed sense of openness that replaced his angst-laden gesturalism with a new, lyrical designation. The wispiness of his brushstrokes and the coy horizon that reluctantly reveals itself alludes to a kind of romantic experience in which nature is contemplated. What magic it is that these small canvases stretch expansively outward from their format! Leestemaker has revealed one of the most primal, reductive illusions possible in painting. How amazing that these simplistic little allusions to land and sky project such a luminous vastness. Every little particle of paint that drifts laterally across these open landscapes suggests the possibility of a distant form. Every color arouses within us a familiarity of place, as local color merges with transient light.

In effect we see these paintings as fragments from some sort of geographic memory we all carry with us. We connect the dots in order to fulfill our need to relate Leestemaker's world to our own.

Some of the Inner Landscape paintings look like the blustering North Sea although they are perhaps more inspired by the Pacific coast. Some suggest a distinctly Western vista of dry earth and big sky. His viewer's inevitable associations with familiar places have amused Leestemaker over the years with exhortations of certainty about locations represented in the paintings. His works have reminded people of sites from Cape Cod to the Argentine Pampas. Leestemaker invites these associations and yet works wholly in the studio, his concern more with formal relationships than with representation. He works intuitively yet deliberately, adjusting and readjusting his dual planes of coincidence. This is partly to tease out spatial and atmospheric effects, but more importantly, is about the play of the brush and the palette knife, working the luminous buttery paint into the surface of the canvas. Leestemaker is at his happiest when he is physically involved with his materials, aiming for a kind of unification of substance and image.

Out of the restrictions imposed by his limited eyesight in 1997, Leestemaker arrived at a serial format for his small paintings, arranging them in a rectangular configuration of 12. The repeated format gives a sequential effect of time passage within a singular location. He has continued to work with this multi-panel arrangement into the present. As installation, the relationship of composition to format produces an immensely satisfying abstract design. At the same time though, Leestemaker longed for the physical involvement of large-scale gestural painting. He knew that if his little paintings could feel so expansive so too could enlarged versions of the same.

Fortunately for Leestemaker his eye surgery was ultimately successful. With his vision intact he found he could return to painting on large canvasses. In 1999 his Transfigurations Series continued to investigate the vertical format/horizontal illusion of the Inner Landscapes while building upon Leestemaker's growing repertoire of gestural brushwork and atmospheric effects. In these works the epic scale and romantic skies have the optimism and buoyancy of a Thomas Cole or an Albert Bierstadt. They address a kind of Western transcendent spirit. This spirit abounds in the form of swirling clouds and patches of sunlight. The representational suggestions of sky and plain seem exploratory. Leestemaker has his eyes wide open. This is a distinctly American terra incognita that he traverses with brush in hand. What he observes are not the fixed features of the Rockies or the Pacific, but a fleeting world of colored light that transforms everything. Thus the Transfigurations. They are reminiscent of photos taken through the windows of a moving car or train, again suggesting, not specific landforms, but the long spaces between. They are the seemingly boundless voids of the American West, the empty quarters that we pass through, in which we are a transient element within nature's own impermanence. Leestemaker's spaces also function as evidence of an eternal spirit in their ever- horizontal recumbence. They represent a stasis present in the universe. The forces of change within nature are a constant. There is also a duality here, a balance to be struck between two states of existence, the spiritual and the physical. There is earth and there is sky. Thus the drama that transpires in the nuances of his coloristic brushwork, achieving contrast and unification.

The Inner Landscapes and the Transfigurations are light, space, and atmosphere, but they are also simply beautiful colors. There is a directness that speaks of Leestemaker's belief in his craft and the power of his feelings. To understand this is to understand the modus operandi of Luc Leestemaker. His approach is not to illustrate the landscape but to reach inside to uncover and represent that primal sense of place and time that he carries around within himself. How fortunate that he is a first-rate colorist who can also wield an adroit brush and palette knife. He patiently builds up textured surfaces to produce plays of light and shadow within his wide, physical brushstrokes, themselves often blending into larger areas of a singular hue. When he wields his knife he often lays on a thick, textural swath of paint which he works like he is buttering bread, finally leaving a velvety unified color. His brushwork utilizes a thinner consistency of paint. He loads up thick round bristle brushes and works them into the surface with a scrubbing manner that relies at times upon intuitive usage of thicker paint dips that burst forth in places as light or form. Although the spaces in these works seem empty the energy of Leestemaker's brush provides a sense of fullness.

Leestemaker's palette ranges from somber and brooding to buoyant and bright. A certain steeliness can be seen in the rouge oxide he frequently uses in these paintings. He underpaints his work with this earthy red, layering thin veils of related and opposing colors on top until he reaches the dramatic resolution he is looking for. The large color shapes he uses dominate his paintings, appearing at times as both earth and sky and even water. Sometimes one shape is an energetic yellow and the other a celestial blue. So basic and abstract, yet powerfully expressive in the conveyance of nature's moodswings.

Leestemaker is a contemporary exponent of Hans Hofmann's theory of the push-pull dynamics of color and form. The power of forces created by juxtaposed colors was what Hofmann's work was all about and it has been the guiding principle of those who have followed his principles of painting. Hofmann also bridged European geometric and New York school gestural abstraction. While Leestemaker's use of geometry is rudimentary, his expressionistic skill with the brush proves him to be among the ranks of the very best in this genre. After all, these paintings are about making one aware of the presence of the brush. We want to run our fingers over the minute encrustations of texture and the smooth chalky expanses of luminous color. There is a quality of drawing here that is subtle but vital to this illusion. The tension created between image and abstraction is dependent upon the brush as it touches down to canvas, glides across its surface, then pulls away. The viewer is struck with a need to process paint into meaning. We think we see things and this is a delight for the imagination in all of us as we search for familiarity and connection. Leestemaker knows this and he knows how to subvert the lost-and-found appearance of lines and shapes into the singular totality of each composition. With a twist of his wrist he gives us a distant mountain range awash in alpenglow or a thunderstorm about to break over a turgid sea.

Even the smallest of the Inner Landscape paintings provide us associations of place and time, yet Leestemaker always pulls back from representation, turning over his evocations to the caprice of the viewer. Like Mark Rothko before him Leestemaker has embraced a primal ambiguity of illusion that addresses the spiritual as well as the romantic.

He has fused this quality of painterly abstraction with the acknowledgement of nature's inherent beauty. Perhaps Leestemaker has attained a state of closure with the traditions of his past. After all, he has returned our attention to the grandeur of nature and has wed the primitive impulses of expressionism to the genre of landscape painting. Perhaps Jacob van Ruysdael would appreciate the comparison if he were around today.

Doug Meyer is a native Los Angeles artist and writer. He has exhibited his paintings and installation pieces locally for over 20 years and is included in numerous public and private collections internationally. Meyer is an educator at both the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandizing and Mount St. Mary's College, in Los Angeles, California. He has won the Outstanding Faculty Award at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandizing three times.

Transfigurations 2000
By William Torphy

It is extraordinarily rewarding for me as an art curator and collector to witness an artist develop in deep and surprising ways over a period of time. I’ve known Luc Leestemaker for over a decade now. I first met him at his studio then in downtown Los Angeles. I was immediately taken by his earnest personal manner combining poetic energy, a sharp mind and a clear devotion to painting. At the time, his works were bold, highly textured and rather "messy." Messy in the sense they contained an inspired urgency about them, reined in just enough by an intelligence that knew this much expressiveness was chance-taking. In other words, I felt a kind of raw genius in him that was still rough around the edges.

A couple of years later, I was honored to write a catalog essay in conjunction with a show Leestemaker was having in New York. The work in such short time already contained emerging hints of seductive refinement. Fast-forwarding four years, I viewed the early paintings of Leestemaker’s "Transfiguration" series, still as richly textured and layered as the first work but now imbued with subtle modulations of color and massive technical discipline. The energy was still very much present but counterpoised by elements of balance and quietude. I was struck by the over-arching attractiveness of the work, its gentle forcefulness that spoke of land and sky and the ever-changing qualities of light and color from nature.

The newest paintings continue to beguile, capturing the attention of a diverse group of admirers they now serve. The work directly reflects the development of the artist himself who once like many stood a bit apart in the rawness of his studio, and now displays the solitary consciousness of the consummate artist tempered by the social perspectives of the conscientious artisan. I believe that is where an artist exceeds himself, striking a balance without compromising either, between his special vision and acute sensitivity to the desires and functional requirements of his patrons and audience. In collaborating on projects as diverse as a major airport, a world-class hotel, a yoga center, a corporate headquarters or a major urban residential complex (the current Park Place project in Chicago), the artist seems to take his responsibilities for collective interaction with rare enthusiasm and professionalism.

I’m sure it will continue to be a deep source of pleasure to watch Luc Leestemaker grow as a painter and sensitively relate his work to the special environments which they inhabit and enhance.

It can take a great distance to bring you home. Born into a family boasting several accomplished painters, Luc Leestemaker at first chose to scratch his own persistent creative itch with everything but a paintbrush (after a brief, wild fling with the medium in his youth). In his native Holland he was at various times a writer, editor, social worker, arts administrator, and business consultant. In all of these endeavors Leestemaker hewed close to visual art, but never made art himself. At age 33 he moved to the United States – only to find that his forebears’ ghosts had followed him all that distance. Leestemaker settled in Los Angeles – as antithetical a surrounding as he could have found (in the developed world, at least) to his birthplace – and began painting. He did not move to California in order to make art; making art was his response to his new surroundings, a response he recognizes was bred in the bone.

“After I went through the process of writing as a creative outlet,” Leestemaker once observed, “I really felt that I needed to reach into something deeper, where the mind does not directly need to be involved to make decisions… I mean it’s truly an intuitive process that gets me to a place where the canvas starts talking to me, telling me what it needs to create some sort of balance.” The painter was remarking here on his works since 1998, all of which assume the form of an expansive, empty land-, sea- or skyscape, but his remarks illumine the approach to painting he has clearly taken from the start. What has changed over the dozen or so years of Leestemaker’s artmaking is what the canvas tells him it needs. It once needed the chaos of unfettered expression; now, it asks him for the order of modulated sensation. And Leestemaker’s response is to come close to painting actual pictures without stifling the primacy of paint itself.

Interestingly, in finding his way to this very distinctive yet echt hollands style, Leestemaker has recapitulated the dialectical argument that has gone on in Dutch art since artisans in that corner of the world first applied pigment to plane. Will order prevail, or will fantasy? Will the vastness of nature fill the image, or will the teeming tragicomedy of human life? Will things be clean and precise, an idealized natural entropy, or will they be messy and impulsive, in fervent embrace of life’s imperfections? Mondrian, that is to say, or van Gogh?

Like so many neophytes, Leestemaker found his inner Vincent first. Then he added de Stijl to substance, and gradually wended his way to a resolution – a resolution especially Dutch in character. It finds a seamless continuity and harmonious marriage between poles of practice, exploits the best of both poles, and finds myriad points of cohesion and insight between. Between van Gogh and Mondrian you find Rembrandt – virtuosity and expressiveness – and de Kooning – gesture and composition – and that’s where Leestemaker now finds himself.

Indeed, without claiming too much for Leestemaker’s accomplishments, or forcing them into too confining a context, we can regard Leestemaker’s art as quintessentially Dutch – the more so for the thousands of miles he has put between his birthplace and his home. (“I’ve found the perfect mix for a cultural gypsy,” Leestemaker has written, “The bright and warm colors of California, mixed with the hues and clouds of the country I grew up in.”) His work summarizes, almost deliberately, the Dutch visual sensibility. And, as stated, in its development over the past decade, it has re-enacted and has come to resolve the polarities in Dutch painting, To date, it has shown slight favor for the painterly over the precise, for van Gogh over Mondrian – or, put in earlier terms, for Hals over Saenraedam. But at this point it would not be surprising to see Leestemaker’s reduced and subdued approach crystallize into the crisp geometry it already infers.

Beyond re-embodying the history of Dutch painting, Leestemaker’s work has embodied typically Dutch themes. Early on, in several paintings dominated by squares, he iconically evoked the window, a recurring motif in Dutch interior painting – think of Vermeer, and even van Eyck – and in Dutch life in general. (Tourist guidebooks invariably point out the large front windows gracing Dutch houses – so many of them open to the world, unblocked by curtains, a gesture of both Calvinist self-revelation and liberal openness to the world.) On the most transcendent level, furthermore, the window manifests the portal through which light, divine by nature, can enter.
The next step in Leestemaker’s development was to open up the composition itself to light and space – not coincidentally, a thematic concern shared by Dutch art and the art of southern California. In the Camelot and Symphony paintings the density of Leestemaker’s painterly gestures becomes less and less webbed and uniplanar, and he becomes less and less concerned with physically articulating the painting’s surface with the scratches and superficial brushstrokes that enliven his earliest work. In his paintings of the mid-1990s, layers of painterly incident increasingly define a recessional space, and gradually meld into one another, tonally and texturally.

By 1998 Leestemaker had refined his method into the signal format to which he has adhered since. In this format he carefully gradates pigments into one another, allowing bright and earthy tones not simply to co-exist, but to support and contextualize one another. This gradation invariably takes place within a square format and is realized in a cascade of horizontal strokes, one of which is more pronounced than the rest. This de facto horizon line occurs below the middle of the canvas or panel, defining a sky-ground division in which sky predominates – the “Big Sky Country” of both the Low Countries and the California savannah (not to mention desert).

This compositional formula, of course, reads readily as landscape, and conjures the expansive approach to the land characteristic of the great 17th century Dutch painters. Leestemaker’s recent work has been compared to Jan van Goyen’s and Salomon Ruysdael’s; but, if the comparison holds, it is not to the work from the 1630s for which these pioneer landscapists are best known – paintings in which the horizon line is relatively high and irregular – but their later work, in which the horizon has lowered, making a broader prospect available. In this they were joined in the later 1640s and `50s by Philips Koninck, by Ruysdael’s gifted nephew Jacob, and by Rembrandt himself.

Even more than the panoramic landscape, Leestemaker’s recent work reincarnates another Dutch painting tradition: the seascape. Here, the aspect of the tradition Leestemaker extends is not so much that of the Dutch Baroque, with its men-o’-war and commercial frigates commanding the waves, but that of 19th century Dutch painting, more concerned with the waves themselves, with the sea as a natural entity subject to human contemplation. Renditions of the sea and of the beach by such artists as Hague School painter Hendrik Mesdag, translating Barbizon verdancy and the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich into a peculiarly Dutch quasi-Impressionism, comprise the direct antecedent to Leestemaker’s own – although none reached the level of focus and intensity that he seems to manifest in his ongoing series. In his exploration of the sea’s myriad moods he seems to hew closer to Monet’s variational approach, studying and depicting a particular landscape subject (not infrequently the sea or beach) at different times of day and year. And, of course, the sea motif – and sea-seen-from-beach subtheme – are very real experiences in the lives of Hollanders and Angelenos alike.

But, then, are these truly seascapes, or any other kind of landscape for that matter? “They called [them] ‘landscapes,’ which is debatable to me you know,” Leestemaker remarks in an interview. “They really are compositions” – nothing less, nothing more.” He does admit that his formula tends to feature “something of a horizon line, a mass, and some sort of other mass on the back which resembles clouds.” But what they show (or seem to show) is secondary to what sensation they convey, what meta-natural concept they embody. “…[T]hey asked, ‘why so empty?’” he continues. “And I said: ‘Because it is the closest to nothing that I can portray.’” And here, Leestemaker accepts an even more fundamental aspect of his Dutch heritage: a spiritual austerity that borders on Zen, the existential sense of being in nothingness that drove Mondrian to a deep exploration of Theosophy, drove Rembrandt to a passionate excavation of the soul, and drove van Gogh mad. The mystery of existence suffuses Leestemaker’s current painting, and its very unanswerability drives him to paint the “nothing” as often, and as exquisitely, as possible.