Cover art: Lillian Bayley Hoover’s “Suleymaniye”
“How does a young painter today make peace with an art world in which photography and image-mediated reality reign supreme, an art world supposedly after the end of Modernism, in which self-reflexive art-historical irony is all the rage?”
Michael Salcman, LPR’s consulting editor for art, explores this question in his essay, “Painting across the Digital Divide: The Art of Lillian Bayley Hoover.”
Hoover’s “Suleymaniye” is featured on the cover of LPR’s Issue No. 10, Make Believe, which launches this month. This oil on canvas, one of the paintings in Hoover’s Sites of Power series, at first appears to be an abstract painting. Salcman’s essay reveals otherwise.
He writes that many of the artist’s recent works “are based on a trip Hoover took to visit Istanbul and its remarkable Miniatürk park, a permanent outdoor installation in which Turkey’s most famous architectural structures (mosques, palaces, bridges, airports) are faithfully reproduced on a scale appropriate to a child’s playground.”
Salcman’s enlightening essay gave me a deeper appreciation for Hoover’s work. It wasn’t until proofs of Issue 10 were printed that I noticed a corner of green sod curling suggestively away from the ground. The essay also sent me searching for a Gerhard Richter painting, “Uncle Rudi,” to learn more about its history.
Hoover, a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, is one of two artists whose work is profiled in the Make Believe issue. The second is photographer Richard K. Kent, Associate Professor at the Franklin & Marshall College Department of Art and Art History.
Lillian Bayley Hoover will speak about “Suleymaniye” and additional works featured in the Make Believe issue at our June 18 launch event.
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