D. LEGTERS
Documenting the changing landscape, artist D. Legters is intrigued and dismayed by how urban building practices leave pockets of nature in margins of the California landscape drawn by humans.
Legters has artwork in collections throughout the U.S. and has exhibited at the Boehm Gallery in San Marcos, CA, the San Diego Chapter of the California Art Club, Del Mar Southern California Exposition, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, PA, New Haven Art Space, Inc, University of Connecticut Art Museum, and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. Legters has instructed fine arts students at Palomar College, University of Pennsylvania, the San Diego Community College District, and her own private art school in San Diego.
For commission or press related inquiries.
denise.s.legters@gmail.com
D. Legters - a short documentary showing the artists’ process, theme, and tone.
"My love affair with the American landscape started as a child growing up in the backseat of my family’s car shuttling between army bases with alarming regularity, relocating some 20 times before college. Moving landscapes became meditative, animated daydreams. Close objects raced by with frightening speed, while the distant horizon crawled by. Constantly teetering on a fulcrum between the new and old landscapes around me, I found that drawing and painting helped bring focus, presence, and renewal.
My fine arts education was firmly rooted in Contemporary Realism that evolved in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. During my MFA studies at UPENN, Neil Welliver, American plein air painter, and Sewell Sillman, writer and Abstract Expressionist, taught lessons in color theory and life painting, often emphasizing the most abstract qualities of color and the perception of subtle comparisons of hue and value. As a realist with this foundation, recording color has become less about rendering the reality of physical objects, instead observing the changing quality of daylight on site to make an informed, sometimes abstract record of light.
After completing my MFA, I moved to California. With my experience painting from the urban landscape in Philadelphia and my skill with building compositions from comparisons of neutral grays, browns, and more saturated color, California’s challenging subjects of desserts, lagoons, grasslands, and coastal landscapes opened my eyes.
I do subscribe to the plein air tradition of studying landscapes to record light and color specific to atmospheric conditions and time of day, and over the years that I’ve spent painting I’ve become attuned to more than just tonality. I’m drawn to how one thing influences another in a landscape. Topography and geology affect sage scrub and grasslands, mountains laid bare expose chaotic rock formations and fragile desert ecosystems to unpredictable periods of rain and drought. Painting isolated, untouched landscapes has a seductive appeal, but you can rarely admire a vista now without finding evidence of humans.
The lure of Manifest Destiny in the West and the idealized Romantic landscape is no longer relevant to contemporary landscape painting. The objectives of landscape in the plein air tradition need some rethinking. This is the territory I find myself in now, with just the sun arcing through the sky to tell time, far from crowds or an audience."