Richard LaPresti II.

Actually, it is important to separate Richard from Cezanne, too. Recently I wrote an essay for a show of work by several Midwestern artists. I called the show "Post Abstract Figuration." The artists
Philip Hale, Bob Brock, Barbara Lea, Mike Neary, Timothy King and David Rich; had this in common, they were very well prepared to see and feel the abstract construction in nature as they painted. Their training was quite modernist, yet they used it to help realize the motif, and not depart from it. Richard has been doing this since at least 1963. He is thus a member of an older generation at work in the same way. The Midwestern painters all had some contact with people like Wilbur Neiwald, Stanley Lewis, Lester Goldman and Michael Wallin, all of whom themselves went through abstraction on the way to a figurative style. When I went to school in 1952 no self respecting young artist could work in other than an abstract style[and in Lester's case, back again]. After AE gave us carte blanche to go off on our own, as the artists of that generation had done, we found abstraction to limiting a field to remain in. Too many things had been cut off and patented by too many good artists. It seemed as though the greatest area for freedom and personal development would be in working from the motif and trying to realize it in painting. This is what Richard  LaPresti tries to do. One more facet of his personality as exposed in his work needs stressing. He is a very passionate man. His paintings are, in fact meditative, but they also are full of passion. Passion for the floor, the walls, the people, their relationships, the air in the room - of course in his interiors. And similar passion for the sky and the clouds and the air between us and them, and the land, the trees and foliage coating and sprouting from it and all of the buildings. He expresses his passion with his brush and the paints he chooses. This is sometimes why the intensity of colors is more than merely normative. The colors are exaggerated because they make more pictorial sense that way and because the exaggeration feels more right than reportage would feel. He is not reserved about his forming but full of zest and verve and passion. So we cannot discuss his color dispassionately as a constructive element, only;  although, of course it is that, too.

So, there are at least two generations of such artists. Come to think of it, there are three. Originally Leland Bell, Al Kresch, Nell Blaine and Louis Matthiasdottir were also abstract painters. When they returned to figuration they did so with all the intelligence which had informed their abstract paintings. Unlike Balthus or Derain all of them were abstract artists first, before they returned to the motif.