Leemour Pelli: Paintings and Drawings
The aesthetic and formal accomplishments of Leemour Pelli, which are maintained alternately through the activities of painting and drawing, accrue in their degree of portent as they develop her subject matter—an extended treatise on the irreconcilable workings of the heart. Pelli is dedicated to using the human figure as a scale for gauging human drama, and her work springs from an interest in the aesthetic interstices of linguistic and pictorial inspiration. It is at once an investigation of the issues of her own life—which deal mainly with pain, loneliness, and memory; longing, solitude, and desire, and with matters of formal craft. Despite its strong emotional tenor, it should be viewed as an alternating cycle of interpretations. Just as a writer may revise characters from one book to the next, so Pelli reinterprets her characters, the world they live in, and the terms of their thematic reception. Pelli’s work possesses a dynamic emotional charge which, along with her use of the fig