Doris "Doc" Leeper
(1929-2000)
Images
About the Artist
Critical Essay Dowis
About the Artist
Doris "Doc"
Leeper's career as a professional artist spanned more than four
decades, beginning in 1950 with the first exhibition of one of her
paintings and ending only with her passing in 2000. Her life as an
artist began much earlier, however; at the age of five she started
sketching objects she saw through a magnifying glass. This process
fostered an interior dialog that never ended, one that considered
space, shape and color and was filled with experimentation and
application of artistic techniques that consistently addressed these
formal issues. Leeper had an illustrious career: her two-dimensional
paintings and prints are included in many public and private
collections; her large-scale public art sculptures are installed
throughout the nation and can be seen at many cultural venues and
businesses in the Central Florida area, including the Daytona Beach
News Journal, The Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, and the
Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach. In addition, Leeper was
recognized publicly on numerous occasions and was conferred awards for
her work, not only an artist, but as a trailblazer in regards to arts
planning and funding in Florida and the southeast; environmental
advocacy, preservation and ensuring the federal protection of what is
now Canaveral National Seashore; and as a champion of artistic freedom
and development, culminating in her legacy of the artist residency
program and facilities at Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA) in New
Smyrna Beach. A complete biography and vitae is available on the ACA
web site: <www.atlanticcenterforthearts.org>
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Critical Essay
by Jeannie Dowis,
Curator
The curators are
indebted to the University of
Central Florida for its loan of
the Leeper works included in 2dx3dx5. We are
also deeply grateful to the academic work of the curators and
historians at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, Winter
Park, for compiling an excellent catalog for the Doris
Leeper: A Retrospective exhibition staged there in 1995;
excerpts of Leeper's statements quoted below and biographical
information are taken from that publication and its contributors,
Robert S. Lemon, Jr., Ph.D. and James J. Murphy, Ph.D. Their research
and critical insights have been duly noted.
Color in
Shape: The Two-Dimensional Works
Leeper began
studying art in high school in the mid-1940's, even transforming a
garage apartment at her parents' home into a studio and "museum" to
house natural specimens she collected and drew. She entered Duke University in 1947 as a pre-med
student (thus, the nickname "Doc"), but changed her major in 1949 to
art history at the encouragement of her instructor and first
influence, Charles Sibley. A busy athlete and campus leader, Leeper
somehow found time to paint; she entered a piece, South Extension,
in the Eight [sic] Annual Piedmont Festival of Music & Art in
Winston-Salem, where her instructor won the first place prize (Murphy,
82). She graduated with honors and had her first one-person exhibition
the following year, then began working for the Charlotte Engraving
Company as a commercial artist, doing layout and design (Murphy 82-3).
Over the next ten
years, Leeper traveled with friends to see art and architectural sites
of interest, moved around the Atlanta,
Georgia region for employment reasons, and eventually settled in
New Smyrna
Beach in Eldora, an area now
within the boundaries of the Canaveral National Seashore (Murphy,
83-4). While ensconced in this remote area in the early 1960's, Leeper
worked in isolation much of the time and began to find and define what
we now witness as her signature shape and color-conscious style.
As her body of
work morphed from realistic interpretation to non-objective studies to
geometrically dominated pattern compositions, Leeper became more and
more obsessed with the conveyance of specific color, and changed her
tools from palette knife to brush to enamel sprayer. This change is
most dramatically illustrated when comparing two works included in
2dx3dx5, 1962’s The Quarry (oil on masonite), a
piece completed through traditional painting techniques, to Split
Square Series: 34” (enamel on masonite), completed in 1973. Gone
are the suggestions of geometry within real or imagined narrative
imagery; present are pure color, form and line.
Leeper’s use of
sprayed enamel was a practical one: to flatten the application of
paint, so that the viewer would perceive only the color dynamic within
the piece, not the landscape of the painted surface itself. In fact,
she seems to have been more interested in the interplay of sections of
color and the negative space between than the painted portions of the
work (Lemon, 7-8). To refine this process, Leeper often put down
hundreds of layers of paint to achieve the color she was after. Her
process was intense and time-consuming; she layered paint for
monochromatic effect, yet speckled layers are evident upon close
inspection (Lemon 7-8). Masked-off areas created sharp lines,
delineating complementary colors and suggesting, states art historian
Robert Lemon, "vibrations, hence, tensions," between the colors
resulting in the work conveying a flattened yet highly sculptural
effect (Lemon, 8). The work, then, while technically a "painting,"
transcended the medium, and became something in and of itself.
Multiple Images XVII (enamel on canvas) (ca. 1975) is an example
of this technique.
It is important
to note that it is in the late 1960's and 1970's, as Leeper’s
three-dimensional work evolved out of this painting process, her
two-dimensional works also became more sculptural in presentation and
subject matter. Leeper executed her two-dimensional works on diamond,
square, sphere and triangle cut surfaces and, if multiple small
paintings comprised a larger work, they were often arranged in a
geometric format, rather than the more pedestrian rectangle or square
picture plane, to maximize this impact.
In the 1980's,
Leeper dabbled briefly with the effects of sprayed paint in a more
atmospheric application, but these non-objective musings quickly gave
way to pieces featuring strong lines and angles, now drawn in
multiples, stacked and spiraling throughout the picture plane. Nowhere
is this more evident or more fully realized than Leeper’s work Dark
Nails (1982-3), which began as a lithograph in honor of the London
Symphony Orchestra’s biennial appearance in Daytona Beach
(Retrospective Catalogue, 60-64). Works of the period show her more
architectural focus, and are obviously influenced by the abundance of
sculptural commissions she completed at the time. While she continued
to paint, draw and make prints in her signature style, her
two-dimensional works of note are largely paintings created in the
sixties and seventies.
Leeper made the
transition from flat paintings to painted relief works in the eighties
as well. These pieces, executed in stainless steel and plastic, were
what she called “quilts,” large-scale works featuring multiple,
identical dimensional paintings, structures made up of incorporations
of triangles that captured light, shadow, reflection (Lemon, 21). The
works affect a folded yet flattened feel, and are an excellent attempt
at sculptural, mono-chromatic minimalism. The reflective qualities of
the pieces in stainless steel make the works seem continually in flux;
others, featuring mono-chromatic color schemes make each combination
of multiples highly textural, yet serenely balanced (Retrospective
catalogue, 66-68). It is here that Leeper the painter left interplay
and tension through color in her two-dimensional works and began using
it primarily in her more monolithic outdoor sculptures.
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Shape in
Color: The Three-Dimensional Works
It is telling
that although Leeper began her studies and career as a painter, even
in her more realistic two-dimensional works from the 1950's and early
1960's her work is largely shape-oriented; it would seem she chose
subject matter for her narrative content precisely because of its
formal geometric qualities. She executed numerous non-objective and
abstract paintings, getting away from narrative content almost
entirely, but stated in an interview with Lemon, “…many works done
during that period…have been destroyed. Huge numbers of them, some of
them that were totally abstract. But I kept throwing them away,”
(Lemon, 4). Leeper’s work became less “painterly” as she began to
delineate the painted areas on her surfaces; she was only satisfied
when she incorporated color into formal geometric shapes.
Finally, in
1964-5, while she was in the midst of her "Probing Essentials" series,
she suddenly found the need to sculpt as well as paint. About this,
the artist stated, "...I was working one day on one in that series
and it said to me: ' I need to be shaped, I need to be
three-dimensional.' And it took me months to build this piece [Matter-Energy:
a Deformation of Space], because I had never built anything of
that nature. [The sphere shape] needed a life of its own to get it off
that two-dimensional, painted surface,” (Lemon, 7). After this
experience, and the success of the piece (it won first place at the
State Fair in Tampa), Leeper began considering
negative space and shape in both two and three dimensions. In 1967 she
created stand-alone sculptures that resembled carved out and columnar
versions of graphic design lettering and the space between the letters
(often represented in her paintings of that era), resulting in the
“Surveyor Series,” which features a prominent “I” (Lemon 7-9). The
painter was a sculptor all along.
Lemon notes that
in previous works, Leeper “played with the relationship of figure to
field. In three dimensions, that translates to the relationship of
solids to voids…this aesthetic dates back to Greek architecture.
Relationships of solids to voids were significant to the Greeks…the
spaces between the columns…define each other just as the figure and
field do. One is nothing without the other,” (Lemon 13-14). This is an
important observation and one that is key to understanding Leeper’s
sculptural oeuvre. Her sculptures share many properties with classical
architecture and, in a post-modern turn, distill the Greek’s idealized
geometry and the quest for Plato’s “perfect form” to monumental
representations of the forms themselves in multiple.
If we consider
Leeper a post-modern classicist, using modernist and minimalist
concepts to realize her quest for balance in composition, then the
triangle was her perfect form. In nearly all of her painted works, and
in virtually all of her sculptures, the triangle, if not the outright
“subject” represented, is utilized as a key structural motif. A large
outdoor sculpture done in 1982 for the Daytona Beach News-Journal is a
perfect example: A series of six triangles, appear as if the corners
of pages of a newspaper, caught at various angles and in varying
degrees of openness. Like formal cubist works of the early twentieth
century, the piece, while bold, linear and static, depicts the action
of the page turning at various heights. As a corporate commission, it
is extremely successful, in that it embodies the newspaper’s mission
while it completely expresses the artist’s intent and focus of her
work during that era. (The piece is still installed on site at the
News-Journal headquarters on 6th Street in Holly Hill.)
Later works
emphasized the triangle and its variations in diamond and
parallelogram shapes, but did so by realizing heavier, more planar
forms. Leeper’s “Ancient Games” series, begun in the mid-eighties and
continuing through her final productive period in the late nineties,
featured stacked geometric forms in relation and juxtaposition to
singular spheres. Executed in wood, wood and metal or metal alone, and
painted in sections of singular color enamel or left natural, these
chunkier-looking sculptures delved further into the realm of basic
form and resemble gigantic, angularly cut children’s blocks in
formations that literally hang or balance unevenly in space and
enclose the sphere. Leeper credits the inspiration of ancient Mayan
art with influencing her entire body of work, yet nowhere is it more
apparent or referenced than in the “Ancient Games” series. She chose
the corbel arch form in these works specifically because of its use by
the Maya, and conceived aesthetic moments in time during ancient (and
deadly) ball games (Lemon 25-6).
Leeper used block
and sphere hand-held wooden forms to envision and design both the
small and large works from the mid-eighties on, yet by this point in
her career was able to have others fabricate the large structural
sculptures for her. She even acknowledged the help of fellow artists
Jerry Napoli and Dan Gunderson on Ancient Games XII (1986) (on
permanent exhibition outdoors at the Cornell
Fine Art Museum at Rollins
College), with working out some of the physical design issues inherent in
creating such a piece. Napoli
helped obtain and finish the blocks to scale and Gunderson formed the
sphere; Leeper states that this was the closest she ever came to
collaborating with other artists, but it obviously proved fruitful, as
she built on this experience to create numerous works in the series
over the next decade (Lemon, 24).
It is interesting
to note that in Leeper’s final years before she succumbed to cancer,
she created her most light-handed and lyrical works, a series entitled
“Garden Sculpture.” These large works feature singular colors,
triangle shapes which point outward and upward, and brilliant chrome
or mono-chromatic spheres that rest on top, not within, the larger
structure (Retrospective Catalogue, 51-3). As close to a figurative
reference as Leeper ever allowed, these geometrically built forms seem
to stand, dance and leap in their outdoor habitats.
Atlantic
Center for the Arts, Leeper’s brainchild and legacy, is home to one of these
works. Celebration ’96 is well placed, standing serene among
the scrub palmetto and pine trees on the busiest section of boardwalk
for all who venture to contemplate and admire. Leeper lived in and
loved the natural environs of outdoor coastal
Florida; perhaps it is because of this
rough, wild environment that she continually sought order, line and
perfection of form in her clean and geometrically-based artistic
oeuvre. Whatever the impetus, Leeper’s work that stands at ACA,
indeed, her entire body of work, is a reminder to all that the most
formal properties of composition are elemental and always applicable.
Her artistic theories and intent are as clear and intact when we view
her work today as they were in her lifetime, which would please her,
as these concepts are the “perfect forms” of an artist’s
life.
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