Georges Lebar

I sat down with Vickie Pierre and Georges Lebar, who both submitted paintings, along with several other ArtCenter resident artists, that are now on display at an exhibit on Miami Beach titled Black to Black: A discourse on color and race.
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Georges Lebar
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Georges Lebar

Lebar left Australia at the age of 17 to live in Paris, where he studied fashion and illustration.A year later he attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and after working for various fashion houses in New York City, became interested in the fine arts.He expanded his mediums to video and photography while attending the New World School of the Arts in Miami and is now a resident artist at ArtCenter.One of the ideas of the show was to present paintings that used the color black as a hue and Lebar's Nude and Nude Black Study both represent this concept.

"These pieces come from a new body of work called Magic that ...in this particular show are about the loss of identity," said Lebar."It worked with Black History Month because it was saying that ‘I am not this physical image, I am an image but I'm not categorized."

I asked Lebar about the painting called Nude, an image of a face that fades in and out of shades of black.

Nude Face by Georges Lebar
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Nude Face by Georges Lebar

"It's not silent," he said, "but it's trying to get the viewer to look at it in a different way without color or race or creed, it's just the essence of the portrait."

When I first approached this story I made the assumption (wrongfully so) that the artists would be black, and we would discuss issues in the art community as it related to black artists, but after meeting Lebar, who is white, and learned of his involvement in the show, I found the story moving in another direction, off the beaten path.Looking back I found that I was guilty of some of the same assumptions we all fall for in our everyday lives.

"The show sort of breaks out of that idea that ‘You're black, you should be in this show'," said Lebar."It was about the work and the intention of the work that fitted with the idea, which was very clever.

Nude Study Black by Georges Lebar
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Nude Study Black by Georges Lebar

"When you look at art," said Lebar, "there's always two rules that I use, and that is, ‘What do you see?' and then secondly, 'How does it make you feel?' And if you ask yourself those questions, then the art starts to talk to you and you start having a relationship with it.