LELAND WALLIN
REVIEW EXCERPTS
“Lee [Leland] Wallin has chosen to paint a convincing visual world in which artificial man-made objects stand-in for the human world. He paints his substitute world with an obvious love of the objects revealed by the careful attention paid to the nuances of light, color and texture they share with all objects in the real world…. However, in our open society, probably only the artist knows the implied meaning carried by the objects the artist has chosen for his paintings…. It is in this ambiguous Duchampian sense that Lee Wallin’s still-life paintings must be studied….
Wallin presents us with impeccably crafted visual puzzles that are also beautifully realized representational paintings, and elegant geometric abstractions painted with optimistically clear colors, depicting still-life objects in bright light.”
Philip Pearlstein
"Still Life Paintings of Lee Wallin"
Leland Wallin Skyscraper Still Life:
A Realist Riding the Reflective Edge Keystone College, solo catalog, PA, 2015
“Wallin’s hard work, skills, erudition and concerns about the fate of humanity have come together in his most recent paintings….Reflecting a master of his craft at the top of his game, these are amazingly complex, sophisticated ensembles of toys and objects that are at once aesthetically pleasing and thought-provoking. They reflect the artist’s conclusion that ‘it is with a touch of humor and a tinge of tragedy that the dramas of contemporary life emerge in my paintings. The adult metaphors may reflect everything from ironic wit to moral contradiction. They are discovered through direct observation contemplation.’
In 1983 Wallin told a reporter for the New York Daily News that ‘I want to create paintings which are upbeat and complex and challenging to me and enjoyable to viewers.’ In the intervening years he has lived up to that standard with gusto and joyful exuberance.”
Steven May
“LELAND WALLIN Child’s Tables: Reflections on the Adult World,” Greenville Museum of Art, NC, solo catalog, 10-11/07
“In a diverting still-life exhibition…we sense a general yearning for a return to simpler values….Simplicity in this case implies straightforwardness and an absence of guile or contrivance rather than simple-mindedness.
….It is an exhibit of broad, regional scope, featuring 35 works by 22 artists …. It includes paintings from New York’s Fischbach Gallery and Philadelphia’s More Gallery.
…..Leland Wallin’s oil, “Fruit Tops With Hawaiian Floral Fabric,” is charged with something of this North Carolinian’s real powers as a painter.”
Victoria Donohoe
“The still life: 35 visions are diverse"
Philadelphia Inquirer, PA, 6/17/01
“At first glance Leland Wallin’s still-lifes emit a “pop” sensibility. This is a false reading. His colors may be more twentieth century than many of the artists in this exhibition but this is on account of the artist choosing objects which were produced in his age -- plastic toys or toys painted with plastic paint. (The artist, himself, uses the traditional medium of oil paint.) These are not “hip” works but paintings developed over long periods of time: where objects are rightly placed and where space and light are measured. The illusionistic element in the work is also an indicator of Wallin’s interest in joining the pre-modern with the post-modern. These are honest paintings in the way Morandi’s still-lifes are. And like Morandi there is a strangeness to the work which is both inside and outside of its time.”
“The nine painters in this exhibition….were trained to see abstract connections between objects….to pursue directions more human, more spirited.”
Robert Godfrey
“Aspects of Representation: 9 Painters,” catalog
Western Carolina University, NC, 8/98
“.... Then, perhaps it can be said, that most of what we think of as “realism” is often more aptly described as “illusionism.” ….This point is well illustrated by Wallin’s work in the exhibition. His small but monumental oil depictions of cropped, detailed objects (often toys), in the foreground of an immense landscape, are illusionistic in their reinterpretation of reality. “Atlantic Beach II” is oddly defiant of its relatively small scale - a meticulously rendered toy truck in the foreground forces a close-up view which plays havoc with our natural sense of scale. This painting is one example of how contemporary artists reinterpret what they see in ways which are calculated to make the viewer take a fresh look.”
Kathleen Duncan
"Painting the Real World," Sunday
Asheville Citizen-Times, NC, 7/26/98
"....At first they [realists] defended the crumbling bulwarks of subject matter against the onslaughts of abstraction; today, oddly enough, they staff the outposts of formalism against the sociopolitical avant-garde….‘Isn't that an irony?' Leland Wallin gently ponders....These paintings have more to do with pondering life's passages than pining for childhood....There is also the notion that we play with toys throughout life. Some of the toys Wallin paints represent children's visions of adulthood, and there are parallels between the seriousness with which children and adults cling to their toys.
Leland Wallin's 'Three Tabletop Toy Turtles' finds the artist playing with high-key color and different intensities of shadow....The combination of vivid color and vivid detail nearly carries the real into the surreal….Wallin does not discourage varied readings of these paintings, but in some ways the content seems little more than an opportunity to explore matters of form, such as color relations and composition structure, the realm of abstraction. His attention to the various values of shadows, cast in layers against floors and walls, testifies to this interest and seems to indicate that representation in not necessarily the restricting tyranny against which abstractionists rebelled."
Chuck Twardy
"Getting Realism: Show Brings Treats and Traps into Focus," News and Observer, Raleigh, NC, Sunday, 12/12/92
"Leland Wallin's articles are, as are his paintings, of great import, and they signify that he has structured his approach to Realism intellectually. His thoughts are firmly rooted in the traditions of European art, from the mastery of perspective to the complexities of abstract pictorial structures of twentieth century art. His painting skills are a summation of a tradition that extends back to the Florentine Renaissance, while the implications of his still-life subjects are richly burdened with metaphors, if a viewer chooses to study them so. For his paintings demand study on the part of the viewer. Thoughtfully conceived and slowly developed, they have none of the fast fun-and-games punch of so much of figurative "New Imagist" current art.
The mainstream history of Modernist twentieth century art is the story of various attempts on the part of European oriented artists to accommodate the intuitive and the illogical with fragmented remnants of Florentine Renaissance art. This attempt to wed the two opposites accounts for much of the excitement and drama of Modernist art. Increasingly in our century, the elements of illogic tend to become dominant, and have come to represent the overthrow of old European traditional values. I believe that to a great degree, it is the current generation of Realist painters who are among the last defenders of these traditional values, not as being retrogressive, but as defenders of logic, for survival.
It is in the context of this battle that Leland Wallin's dedication to the refinement of his approach to still-life painting must be appreciated. He is among the most dedicated of the contemporary Realists. Each of his paintings must be seen as a trophy wrested in battle."
Philip Pearlstein
solo show brochure, NYC, 4/91
".... Wallin continues to paint still-life, but, and it is an important but,...he has ventured out-of-doors and combined landscape with objects....One of the strongest of these new works is "Wooden Grasshoppers with the Great Outdoors" in which a Vuillard-like pattern of foliage and cloud serves as background for the tabletop still-life….Of the interior still-lifes themselves, there is an increasing opening-up of space, less complication. ...'Whistle Family' clusters four whistles, 'tied-up' like hostages, near the front edge of a table with nothing in the background but cast shadows. The mood is eerie, surreal, a strange mixture of Morandi and de Chirico….
Because of his predilection for toys and their relatives--kites, balloons, etc.--a certain playfulness and humor is more-or-less built into Wallin's work, yet, formally, it is quite serious, even ambitious: he sets hard tasks for himself.
In an unexpected painting, dated 1990, Wallin depicts, for the first time that I know of, only one object. A toy, yes, but only one. Perhaps that’s why it is titled ‘Four Endangered Species.’ It shows an elephant, not a toy, strictly speaking, but a bank, standing stalwartly on a small table set in a seamless space. The painting only measures 32” x 36” and yet its presentation of scale makes it seem much bigger. The shiny metal beast holds a quarter in its trunk about to place it in the slot provided in its forehead. This mechanization of a wondrous animal projects a pathos which has to do with connections between robots and living creatures. Wallin has given it an ironic subtitle: ‘elephant, eagle, bank and monetary economy.' "
Ralph Pomeroy
solo show brochure, NYC, 4/91
"Leland Wallin's paintings have a way of capturing attention for what they are saying at the very surface, then recapturing interest for what the eye catches on that moment of looking away....Wallin is a realist. But, given his altered vision, he is a scion of surrealists like Magritte and Dali. Their foundations are in the techniques of the Renaissance, but their concepts are pure late 20th century.
Through his realism, Wallin is able to make fully recognizable statements about things that are vitally important to him. Placing wooden toys like birds and grasshoppers in a natural setting symbolize his concern for the destruction of nature and the increasing list of endangered animal species. In doing so, he has almost single-handedly created a new genre of painting. 'I use toys in the landscape to create a new kind of stylistic species. It is historically different,' he points out. 'The landscape is a combination of the synthetic and the natural.' "
Wallin prefers to work in oils and … says that oils allow him to gain the higher intensity of hues and transparency that typify his works.”
Daniel L. Cusick
"Realism: Finding the Natural Mode"
The Scrantonian, PA, 4/28/91
"…. ‘Red Child’s Table…’ was four years in the making….Leland...paints his objects larger than life with intense, high-key colors, luminous electric lighting, and with an optimism expressed through a table top filled with toys.”
Cover Discussion
Instructor Magazine, NY, NY, 11-12/83
"....Underlying all the bright colors, the balanced tension of the dolls, puzzles and paint boxes that Wallin creates is the realization that human life is fragile; the backward glance at childhood with all its implied security and innocence….We outgrow the toys; the toys outlast us."
Kathy Larkin
"The Man Who Paints the Dolls"
Daily News, NY, NY, 4/11/83
"These days it's getting so you can know a still-life painter by his trademark. Janet Fish has her Depressionware glass, Audrey Flack her poker hands and cosmetics, William Bailey his mysterious crockery. Now, in his first one-man show in New York, we have Leland Wallin, a young American still-life painter to be reckoned with. Wallin, you see, has his toys.
....While there is, indeed, a strong formal urge in Wallin's painting-not the least his balancing of one high-toned color against another-it exists as a kind of subplot to the real story he is telling: the awesome poignancy of the things pictured, of things old and human....Strongly felt, but never sentimental, the dolls, cars, and tops are still-life studies in man's unholy alliance with matter: we outgrow the toys, but the toys outlive us. As represented by Wallin, these childhood totems are both intimate--in blown-up scale and vivid color--and remote—as objects in a format. Yet someone has taken time to perceive--and to care. Let saints "put away childish things." Artists like Wallin, at least, have license to still play with--and instruct us in the mysteries of--toys."
Gerrit Henry
solo show brochure, NY, NY, 4/83
“....Wallin loves to thrust objects toward us. In this case it is the recorder riding the wooden truck. The scissors do the same but at an oblique angle, their aggressiveness emphasized by their precarious position and the mysterious ‘absence’ of the table leg which should appear directly underneath their orange handles. Instead, the punning shape of an elephant’s trunk in cut paper dangles down [beneath a wooden elephant]. One of the finest passages in the painting is the handling of the chipped paint of the chair which has become a kind of working-class marble through heavy, loving use (in a way, worn to a dazzle). The painting is a breathtaking harmony of high color and clutter, oddly innocent and worldly at the same time.
....airiness enhanced by a wonderful bird kite with wings outstretched in benediction [‘Striped Child’s Table with Kite, Dolls and Beads’].... There are the animating shadows, too, both in the background and on the table and the cloth. Reflections enrich the car and camper, giving them a grace and lightness [Car-camper, Hawaiian Floral Fabric and Butterfly Kite]. The table itself is extremely tilted with a series of nails showing like punctuation marks in the canvas itself. There is only one visible table leg again, causing unease; we are experiencing a balancing act....It is also beautiful in color. For some reason the car and its camper seem more vulnerable, almost 'human' in quality.
Wallin's still lifes are assuredly modern in their high-keyed color and aggressiveness of 'tone.' They seem a reaction against the often heavy-handed symbolism and overall somberness of traditional still lifes....He sees toys as universal subject matter and his 'Child's Table' series as being in the direct line of Harnett's 'After the Hunt' series and Chardin's variations on the theme of 'Attributes.' His point is well taken."
Ralph Pomeroy Arts Magazine, NY, NY, 4/83
"Life Affirming. The larger-than-life, high-keyed color still-lifes of Leland Wallin...employ the conventions of realism to make unconventional super-realist paintings. Wallin selects objects as symbols that are life and pleasure affirming, thus the title, "Child's Table Still Life: the Kite, Top, and Doll Series". He has taken a traditional mode of expression, still life, with its symbols of the past and, perhaps, death and given it modern life-affirming implications.
In these paintings of children's toys on table tops, Wallin creates a curious tension between the intimate handling of his objects and their aggressive scale and composition. His full-size preparatory blue line drawings, and their presence in this exhibit demonstrate Wallin's clarity of intent through the use of color to create space, form and mood in his paintings. The cluttered baroque compositions, as well as the simpler ones that make use of 'empty' space, are impressive works."
Diana Freedman
"How the Past Serves the Present” Artspeak, NY, NY, 3/83
"Leland Wallin's still life features a jumble of lavishly dressed dolls, a bird-kite and over-sized conch shells....this is a virtuoso essay in patterns and glistening high-keyed colors."
Vivien Raynor
"Realism at the Robeson Gallery"
The New York Times, NJ, Sunday, 8/9/81
“Leland Wallin jam-packs an oil with the marvelous detailed toys of childhood.”
David L. Shirey
“Art Sampler”
The New York Times, NY, NY, 9/27/81
"The crisp and larger-than-life-size treatment [of Wallin's “Child's Table with Kite, Dolls and Beads'] is offset in this case by the romantic tone of the arrangement, with its seashells, lace doll dresses, floral patterns and bird-kite spreading its wings at the top."
Eileen Watkins
"Exhibit takes modern look at realism,"
Sunday Star-Ledger, NJ, 7/26/81
"....Leland Wallin's close-up of his wife (“Meredith with Carousel Horse”) pushes high-keyed accuracy beyond the monumental to an intimate mode. Detail is not so much scaled-up as hyper-present, on the verge of coming alive. Wallin seems driven by a Pygmalion impulse."
Carter Ratcliff
"Woman" catalog, NY, NY, 11/79
"Leland Wallin's...Child's Table with Kite, Doll and Beads, brought a new baroque flavor to that school of painting, cluttering precious object upon precious object in an almost frightening display of realist virtuosity."
Gerrit Henry
"New Talent"
ARTnews, NY, NY, 10/79
"Leland Wallin employs foreshortening, tonal modeling, the balance and counter-balance of compositional harmony...so that, with luminous wit, they come to life and his subjects float up off the surface in a super-real manner….Each has his or her own style of wit, and a distinctive way of turning it into elegance. Both qualities are profoundly appropriate these days. Wit is the best appeal to an audience inundated by programmatic, too-solemn art. Elegance is wit with a sense of purpose. Elegance is wit’s serious side."
Carter Ratcliff, art critic
"New Talent-New York 1979" brochure, NY, NY, 4/79