Artist Birthday: Laura Shechter

Laura Shechter is an extraordinarily gifted, contemporary realist still life artist who is part of the large body of American artists who have persisted in pursuing the cherished American love of observed realistic painting.

Artist Birthday for 26 August: Laura Shechter (born 1944, US)

Shechter's view of American realism of the colonial period -- the greatest influence on her work -- is that it contrasted to English art of the time in that the realism was genuine, rather than being couched in allegory, symbolism or allusion. American realism has always emphasized an optical document of observed life free (more or less) of literary, historical or romantic interpretation. Her technique involves detailed sketches of a still life from direct observation. The sketch is then arranged with a grid. This is then enlarged and projected on a canvas. Shechter’s work belongs to the tradition of rebellion against Abstract Expressionism which was ultimately dubbed the Photorealism. It was a rejection of the gestural and color field abstraction that dominated American art in the1950s and early 1960s.

Background

The penchant for an acutely observed brand of realism has been present in all periods of American painting. From the earliest years of the colonies, American art patrons preferred down-to-earth depictions of subject matter with which they were familiar rather than any esoteric, philosophical, romantic or high-toned historical content (unless it glorified US history).

Despite the widely held idea that Abstract Expressionism was the "only modern style" in the period after World War II (1939-1945), many artists persisted in stressing realism in their work before it was popular (as in Pop Art) to rebel against America's first indigenous modernist movement.

Pop Art's return to the object was ironic and often satirical. The Photorealism movement that evolved at the same time was less philosophical in its intent. Influenced by the prevalence of the camera and non-subjective nature of the modern photographic snapshot, Photorealist artists presented the world as the camera saw, not as they saw it with emotional or ideological nuances.

Laura Shechter considers herself a second-generation of American realists after such Photorealism artists as Philip Pearlstein (1924-2022) and Richard Estes (born 1932). Born in Brooklyn, she received a BFA in 1965 from Brooklyn College where she studied under Abstract Expressionist Color Field painter Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967). She attributes a certain simplicity in her forms to Reinhardt's philosophy of painting where the surface is reduced to horizontal and vertical elements.

Shechter also claims the influence of commercial art on her still life works. Her husband, BenZion (died 2016) was a commercial artist turned painter, whose process of producing small versions of finished works she adapted. Laura Shechter does numerous studies of her subject in graphite.

She tends to represent the same personal objects in many of her still life works, arranging them usually on a shallow presentation space such as a shelf or mantle. Although her finished paintings may resemble the incisive realism of Dutch Baroque still life, her works do not usually contain philosophical symbolism.