Vintage iconography through the contemporary lens of painter Spencer Herr now on exhibition at Kai Lin Art
by Yu-Kai Lin, photos by Valentin Sivyakov
A gleamingly nostalgic Americana is envisioned through the paintings of Asheville, NC-based Spencer Herr in his latest collection of four artworks now launched at Kai Lin Art in Atlanta, GA.
Each of these immaculate pieces are encased in an ornately hand-built frame that casts an attractively dense shadowbox, beckoning viewers to the painted canvases. We are transported by Herr’s amusing scenes of illustrative characters, much like animation cartoon production cells of the 1940s.
In his Illusions of Separation, a South Pacific sailor holds a map of the Grand Canyon while a pin-up girl in front nonchalantly holds a hammer in one hand while sucking her thumb with another. Her partially dis-robed bustier seductively invites the viewer into her psyche. The sailor pierces his grayed gaze onto an adorably animated bluebird, naively swooping toward the two characters, carefree and blithe. The whole piece is a sublime contemporary update of Gil Elvgren’s pin-up girl illustrations of yesteryear.
In Isaiah’s Spring, we get a prophetic cornucopia of intentionally disparate icons from pop culture. Thumper of Disney’s Bambi sets the tone as his wide-eyed gait excitedly peers past a flying orange butterfly, with its shadow casted across the uniform of one of the three army green plastic toy soldiers saluting the viewer in a stoic gaze. To their right we find a soldier in action with one hand on their holster and the other on a walkie talkie. Enveloping these characters is an oversized round cake with frosting only atop the cake and through its layers of sponge and strawberry preserves, with a gorgeously rendered cherry on top. A whimsical bluebird looks directly at us seemingly saying, “I know this is crazy, but you’re the one looking”.
In his signature piece, Anointed, Herr leans in fully on an idealized femininity, with two Cinderella mice dancing atop the brim of a lawn mowing pin-up brunette. She is in mid work-mode while the birds above her whistle a happy tune. In the background we find the behemoth El Capitan rock formation, painted deftly with a hazy blur. Her sky blue eyes follow us wherever we look, much like Mona Lisa’s pupils, enigmatic and elusive.
Spencer Herr has leveled up his art from his previous body of work by synthesizing the vintage with the contemporary, gracefully recombining iconographic pop cultural imagery in unexpectedly alluring ways.
