Fill out this form to email this article to a friend

Your name		Your email
Recipient email	You may enter up to 20 multiple email addresses, separated by commas.
Your message
Validation Code	Hear validation code
	Enter validation code

We were unable to send your email.

Click here to try again.

New paintings by Lance Rodgers featured in St. Petersburg show

By Lennie Bennett, Times Art Critic
In print: Thursday, May 22, 2008

Below: Lance Rodgers, 29 Minutes After Lunch, 2008, oil on canvas. Images courtesy Lance Rodgers

Story Tools E-mail this story Contact the editor Print this story Comment on this story Social Bookmarking Digg Facebook Stumbleupon Reddit Del.icio.us Newsvine

ADVERTISEMENT

By LENNIE BENNETT | Times Art Critic

ST. PETERSBURG — Horses. Yes, horses. Two big beauties, one black, the other white, set on windswept beaches. You can almost hear the pounding hooves and crashing waves. • Lance Rodgers is back. Not in the literal sense because, despite a harrowing, near-death illness in 2003, he never left, continuing to curate shows at Salt Creek Artworks, where he has a studio, doing some photography.

But he's back to painting, his primary medium, which he abandoned for almost five years. He has completed about 20 canvases (the number is uncertain because he's working up till the Friday opening). They're big, brash and beautifully done. Pretty women, no surprise. Irony and political commentary, ditto. Virtuoso still lifes, check. The horses took some nerve, having a strange kinship with those beefcake portraits of Fabio on romance novel covers. Rodgers isn't sure why he painted them; the show has no overarching theme or unifying principle. He just wanted to paint.

He said he has never done much with waves and wanted to give them a serious try, so, like the horses, several of his expected gorgeous females are backed by them. One woman is draped in wet, translucent white fabric because he wanted to try that, too.

And there's an adorable dog. Unlike the horses, the dog is a political statement, his melting brown eyes staring behind a coil of barbed wire. Diablo the chihuahua is a stand-in for Mexican immigrants and their plight, and Rodgers reinforces his opinion with a butterfly that sails effortlessly over the wire, going the other way, just as most U.S. citizens can enter Mexico without immigration hassles. (Note to purists: Rodgers purposefully did not use a monarch butterfly, which annually migrates to Mexico, because they're expected.) Diablo's nails are painted the same dusty pink as the background of fading roses behind him. One is whimsy, the other symbolism.

Rodgers makes the difference easy to distinguish with his wall labels. He gives the paintings telling names and usually includes a small descriptive passage. That is because he considers these paintings narratives, as in the dog portrait, titled The Immigration Problem, and often metaphors for the changes he has undergone since he almost died from circulatory problems.

In 29 Minutes After Lunch, a young girl's head dominates half of the canvas. She wears a red swimming cap and goggles. A yellow rubber ducky levitates off a concrete wall nearby, probably borne by wind. Behind them, a wave of tsunami proportions approaches. (Many over 50 will remember the old rule that children had to wait 30 minutes after lunch before going back into the water and the time we idled poolside as our mothers checked their watches.) The girl looks fearless and determined — stars are reflected in her goggle lenses — or maybe she's just oblivious to the impending crush of water about to pound her.

Love Monkey pairs Marilyn Monroe with a gorilla. He comes as a supplicant bearing roses, but an oafish one since he has a cigarette hanging from his mouth and a Bluetooth from his ear. She's over it, looking past him toward someone at the next table . . . or the viewer. It's a postmodern King Kong romance, he the insensitive agent of his rejection rather than the tragic hero. Rodgers indicates in his text that he identifies with the gorilla and the viewer, which is to say he acknowledges flaws but remains hopeful.

Maybe that's the unifying principle here, on both a personal and world level. His themes are sometimes too didactic, too obvious. But delivered as they are with such technical flourish and visual loveliness, they have as much bravery as bravado. It's a good place for a painting to balance and for a painter to live.

Lennie Bennett can be reached at (727) 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com.