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LANDMARKS: COEGA

Lez Dor's solo exhibition was recently on view at the Alliance Francaise, Port Elizabeth.

Sincere thanks to Mr C. Freschi and the Alliance Française for their kind support.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:  Lez Dor is a full-time artist, living in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. She has a formal approach to painting, an influence of her training by well known Eastern Cape artists, Neil Rodger, Hillary Graham, Prof. Robert Brooks, and more recently, Prof. Greg Kerr.

She prefers large format, especially when working on her favourite subject matter - man's bent for not merely passing through, but leaving a trail of damage and destruction - using the landscape as the vehicle for exploration and observation. Lez Dor is committed to working for environmental protection, regeneration, and public awareness, using her art as the medium of communication, and is in her second year of service as Nelson Mandela Bay Branch Chair of WESSA ( Wildlife and Environment Society of SA (www.wessa.org.za).

She also has an interest in the artist as observer, record keeper, commentator and activist,  and regarded environmental damage and climate change as urgent subject matter long before it became the public issue it is today.  She is one of15 people to participate in the British Council's Interaction leadership course for 2007/2008,  and recently completed her BTech Fine Art degree at the Nelson Mandela Metro University, where her area of interest was the relationship between humans and the land.

Dor works in both acrylic and oil, on canvas or board, and supports her home town by participating regularly in group exhibitions.  She served a year as Chairman of the Eastern Province Society of Arts and Crafts.  She was a South African finalist in the Windsor & Newton Millennium competition, with the painting "One Small Corner".

Comment by local artist and art writer, Jeanne Wright:

Lez Dor

Landscape painting as an art form tends to be a moribund genre in this country, as it’s no longer being taught in the art schools around the country. Few if any artists actually venture out into the landscape and sketch from the real anymore. Generally, what passes for landscape painting is an imagined vista flattened by digital camera recordings into stereotypical modernist styles and is generally distinguishable by its melodramatic skies and turbulent weather effects, most of which have nothing at all to do with nature!

Lurking in and around the Eastern Cape Province are the remnants of a disparate bunch of artists who were either trained  by British painter and ex-professor Brian Bradshaw under the aegis of the Grahamstown Group, or were taught by second and third tier protagonists from the group who have passed on the heritage and aesthetics.

The Grahamstown  Group was established in the 70’s at Rhodes University. Landscape painting of the local terrain was taught as a subject along with a rigorous programme of drawing from life. Seen as an anachronism at the time, in the context of the development of modern South African art styles, painters from this stable are today some of the only people who are still producing believable large scale works with landscape as the main subject. Lez Dor is one of these. She lives and works in Port Elizabeth.

Taught by Robert Brooks after his retirement from Rhodes as head of the Fine Art department and  by Neil Rodger who was also at Rhodes and now practises as an international landscape and portrait painter, Dor had already completed a formal training at the then Port Elizabeth Technikon under the tutelage of Rodger and Hilary Graham, who was also a Bradshavian. All three are practising large format landscape painters and have completely different approaches to their work.

Dor also works in oils on a large format using a conjunction of local landscape and urban subject matter. Her interest has developed from an early casual interaction with landscape to a passionate personal crusade for the protection and nurturing of natural phenomena around her home town of Port Elizabeth. She has recorded some of the vanishing and transmuting features of the coast, like the salt pans lying in the estuary at the entrance of the newly constructed port of Nquira, aerial views of Spandaukop and the Valley of Desolation near Graaff Reinet, and more recently, the destructive power and devastation wrought by bush fires near the resort of Schoenmakerskop along the southern coastline.

Dor’s crusading pieces have surrealistic overtones and are often darkly ominous and carry portents. Using carefully chosen artefacts, she positions or arranges these as signifiers within the images. She says “ the dark side is where it all happens – always lurking, but usually covert, wrapped in plains and skies, like the box of Life cigarettes smouldering in the abandoned braai fire at Hobie beach, or the Karoo church which has no entrance in the surrounding fence in “Lines of Communication”.

Simple artefacts like sewage pipes, sea facing benches, telephone poles, billboards and ships container boxes become iconic and serve as alienated ciphers in a natural world which lies on the brink of change – these devices operating as conduits for man’s careless intervention in landscape.

The artist herself talks about “man’s carbon and plastic footprint leaving an inescapable destructive trail of high wires, abandoned cars, dead marine animals and extreme weather - the price paid for “development”. She believes the evidence speaks for itself, and regards images of man as unnecessary – “even excessive” to her images – her way of railing against man’s inability to live in harmony with his environment despite the fact that the planet is host and provider of all things which sustain him.

The canvases reflect constant movement both in the brushwork and the compositional movement within the landscape itself, almost as though the earth itself was undergoing tremors. In a curious dichotomy, the neurotic rushes of line and paint are somehow stabilised by the vastness of the vistas, one acting as a foil for the other so that one senses instability while at the same time registering the immutability of nature. The range of her palette underscores the impending themes of doom and that moment of breathlessness before a storm, worked in the arid, bleached ochre typical of the Eastern Cape hinterland and the sullen turgid greys of storm weather over Algoa bay. The canvases often evolve through a cauldron of dark browns and explosive reds through detail to icy cools and cerebral blues.

This is not easy picturesque landscape painting. Acutely observed and often recorded in situ under specific weather conditions, these landscapes are both about natural patterns of change and about recording the kind of mutation which mans’ encroachment in nature is wreaking. As far as Dor is concerned the fulcrum is tilting the wrong way and her work is a plea is for the recognition and arrest of these practices.

JEANNE WRIGHT

Visitors, both individuals and groups, are welcome to visit Studio Dor in Walmer by prior arrangement.

Studio: +27 (0)41  5813495                 

Mobile: 084 7997777  

Email: lez@lezdor.com