Lesley Raeside “Four paintings from 1999 to 2018”

The National Exemplar

This event has ended.

After graduating from Glasgow School of Art, Lesley Raeside rented a studio in the east end of Glasgow where she met an American painter from Berkeley, California who was inspired by the energetic, experimental nature of the downtown galleries in NYC in the early eighties. They had the idea to start something similar in Scotland largely due to the dearth of exhibition spaces in the country.

That’s how Transmission, the artist-run gallery in Glasgow came into being in the mid 80’s.
Raeside’s involvement took the form of a founding committee member, fundraiser, exhibitor, and occasional curator but most importantly, it encouraged her to start painting. Transmission started as a wild experiment - never part of a career plan or an attempt to become part of the establishment - and yet, remarkably, it still exists today and remains true to its original concept.

Lesley came to the US on a scholarship to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, thinking it was in New York City, realizing by the time she was accepted that it was actually in Maine. It turned out to be an important school. There was an impressive group - students from across the US and faculty that included Nancy Spero, Leon Golub, and Judy Rifka - but the most memorable experience for her was meeting Jacob Lawrence. When Skowhegan ended she decided to stay in the US and moved to New York City.

The early painting in this show was made in the late nineties in her studio in Harlem. Working with vinyl paint on raw, unstretched muslin - it’s a small example from a series of larger paintings that look like huge watercolors, folded up afterward like bed linen so that the imprint of creases in the fabric become an integral part of the work.

The recent paintings in the exhibition are small in scale too - about 11 x 14 inches. Store bought boards with smooth, matte, gesso-like surfaces absorb the paint and allow her to build it up in layers, sometimes working on the same painting for months.

“The finished surface is important to me and tends to be matte, opaque and often without brushstrokes or gestures of any kind. There’s usually a single abstract shape in the foreground of the painting - simple, geometric and often repeated - sometimes in exactly the same way in painting after painting. The repetition of form gives me the freedom to focus on other elements that interest me more - such as the building up of color in layers so that it has an energy and an emotional intensity that I want to communicate.” L.R.