In my imagery, I strive for a kind of serenity and mystery that invites the viewer to wander into a landscape or share a human moment.
Fully ensconced now in Seattle, I grew up in a leafy Chicago suburb and subsequently spent many years in San Diego and San Francisco. While I’ve spent quite a few happy hours in art classes of various kinds, my degree is not in fine art but art history. After working in many forms from paper-making to basketry to painting with oil pastels, the last twenty or so years have been concentrated in painting with acrylics.
Thoughts on the portrait work of Lori Duckstein
The color of a leathery, old, catcher’s mitt, the dark, inviting warmth of a bowl of pea soup and the colors of a silken field of sprouting wheat.
Ms. Duckstein’s pallette throws me back to Rembrandt’s…
Her portraits are zany: tongue in cheek mouths, hair-dos from another dimension, collars alternately, choking and cushioning the head on the shoulders of these women.
The eyes seem to tell the story here. I can envision these heads on Easter Island, gargantuan and imperfect, human as all get out. In “Untitled I” the eyes are open to a sometimes tragic, sometimes promising, bearable reality. Intense. In the portrait, “Untitled II” her eyes communicate an almost disappointed but still, resilient gaze. In “Untitled III”, reality comes home to roost as the eyes involuntarily seem to be partly closing to offset a mouth that appears to be “done for”-nearly disappearing entirely. Her hairdo is like antennae—a radio transmission tower, potentially. This is by far the favorite of her portraits, as expressed by several who I have discussed the work with.
Ms. Duckstein begins to pull out all the stops here. She has scaled the paintings up-they seem to reflect her truth as an artist constantly looking out into the world of phenomena. I almost feel a moral statement being made, but it is surely one of relativity when considering each of our individual paths in life. These women begin to get under your skin.
And we applaud the invasion. This work is simply in the tradition of moral painters who, centuries ago, thought it best to interrogate humanity’s “virtues”
Ellen Jordan 2/29/22
Seattle, WA
Artwork available for purchase
email: loriduckstein@comcast.net