The Art of Hester Lessard at the Summer Art Gallery: Exploring the Paradox of Memory by the Art Gallery Committee
The Denman Island Summer Art Gallery’s first 2025 show offers insight into the power, pleasure, and possibilities inherent in abstract painting.
From June 12 to June 24, the Summer Art Gallery hosts a solo exhibit by Denman resident Hester Lessard. This will be the first Denman show for Lessard, who has exhibited at numerous galleries in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island.
The show is entitled Traces. “My aim in this series is to capture the paradox of memories, the way they are both fleeting and indelible. Memories shift, evolve, and disappear, all the while deeply marking us,” says Lessard. The exhibit will also include a sampling of slightly older works.
Exploring dualism
Lessard didn’t set out to create paintings about memory. Rather, the theme emerged from her artistic preoccupations. “I have always, in my painting, dealt with dualisms that have a contradictory element.”
The Traces series explores the tension between permanence and erosion. Initially, these themes were aesthetic categories that manifest on the canvas as dynamic contrasts. Hard-edged lines co-exist beside soft, blurry borders that fade and dissolve. Solid geometric shapes are juxtaposed with atmospheric clouds of colour. Grid-like etchings appear and disappear.
As Lessard worked, she found herself contemplating the ways permanence and erosion characterize human memory. “I kept thinking about how memory has a powerful shape but also dissolves, shifts, erodes, and changes. How, despite its evanescent qualities, it shapes us and is central to the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are.”
Viewers might not see the theme of memory in the paintings, and that’s fine, says Lessard. “When people see abstract work, they often seek a lens through which they can look at the work and understand it. These paintings explore a fundamental dualism which can be read in multiple ways. For me, it is about memory.”
From Protest to Painting
Lessard’s personal history is a study in contrast and change within her artistic practice, career, and her choice of home. She grew up with artistic parents in New York City and attended Columbia University until, in 1968, politics intruded. Lessard was arrested while participating in massive campus protests against the US government’s complicity in the Vietnam war. Staying in the USA began to feel untenable.
“I was attending classes while under indictment by the university. I couldn’t keep doing that,” she says. Lessard, just nineteen years old, moved to Toronto, and soon after that, to rural Nova Scotia, where she lived a classic back-to-the-land lifestyle that included building herself an octagonal cabin. In the meantime, she painted and exhibited, working within the traditional realm of landscape and figurative art.
From Painting to Law, and Back Again
In her early 30s, Lessard had a personal moment of reckoning. Her relationship ended and she took stock of her past, present, and future. “I was so young, barely an adult, when I left the United States. I was all alone, with no support system. It was a large rupture. I’d always had an artistic side, but I used to have an academic side as well.” What would I have done with my life, she asked herself, if I hadn’t left for Canada?
As a result of her soul searching, Lessard enrolled in law school at Dalhousie University in Halifax. After graduating she embarked on a fulfilling and demanding 27-year academic legal career specializing in constitutional law, often with a feminist angle. This brought her to the West Coast where she taught law at the University of Victoria.
As retirement beckoned, Lessard felt the pull of the rural life she’d left decades ago, and, after checking out various island locations, chose Denman Island. Since 2021, she has been splitting her time between Denman and Victoria.
Art also called to Lessard. She picked up her brushes and returned to her old subject matter: landscapes. But while she loved painting again after such a long hiatus, something didn’t feel right. “I was no longer the same person. While I feel compelled to connect to the BC landscape through painting, direct visual representation is no longer the best path for me. To be honest, I was boring myself. I wanted to get beneath surface images, so I started to try abstract approaches.”
A focus on light
Lessard’s metamorphosis into an abstract painter reached a certain completion when she discovered the use of cold wax medium, a soft, malleable, matte-finish substance that combines with oil paint.
“Wax medium’s main attraction for me is how it gets rid of the brush. There are abstract painters who are all about the brush stroke, but I wanted to get away from the tight control the brush facilitates,” says Lessard. She applies the medium with a variety of instruments—squeegees, crumpled wax paper, a credit card, brayers. “You can dab it, you can make texture, and you can create three or four layers and scratch down through the layers.”
Lessard’s abstract painting shares certain qualities with her earlier figurative work. “The central link is the focus on light. My period as a figurative painter was very much preoccupied with the quality of the light, and that’s still central to my art. And that kind of goes against the grain of the abstract tradition. Much abstract art tends to operate in a shallow plane and to avoid creating the illusion of depth. But once you start playing with light, that changes.”
See Hester Lessard’s exhibit, Traces, at the Denman Island Summer Art Gallery, Denman Island Arts Centre, 1016 Northwest Road, Denman Island. Opening reception: Thursday, June 12, 2025, 7:00 pm. Gallery hours: Mon – Sat 11:00 am – 4:00 pm / Sunday 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm. Show runs till June 24.
