The four-foot oil portrayal of a child’s disheveled playroom, titled “Only in Dreams,” flowed off of the canvas and into conversations around ArtExchange’s East Village Art District gallery in Long Beach last Thursday.
Brilliant rays of luminous moonlight gleaming through a window blended into the bright, primary-colored toys; it bounced off of planes, trains and assorted blocks scattered around the room, left over from a play-date right before bedtime.
This submission was Cal State University Long Beach’s Bachelor of Fine Arts senior Tida Whitney Lek’s debut as a featured artist in an off-campus exhibit. Her studies emphasize drawing and painting.
“Art is my addiction; it’s what I go to when I’m frustrated,” Lek said. ”The fantasy world of children was something I was experiencing because I was missing how it was when I was a kid.”
At the time, Lek was immersed in films like “Peter Pan,” “Little Nemo” and “Polar Express.” Her goal was to convey a “feeling of floating, as if you are traveling to another world.”
Lek donated the piece after it spent the past three semesters sitting in her garage, originally painted as an open-assignment, side-project for an intermediate painting class.
She constructed the canvas with $15 stretcher bars as opposed to purchasing a pre-made base for $130; she researched images of cluttered toy piles, moonlight reflections and dreamy landscapes for her subject.
“I didn’t think about it when I was doing [“Only in Dreams”],” Lek said. “But looking back at it now, I had already built a process. I just didn’t know it.”
As a kid, Lek was more than happy to imagine water as paint when taking to the sidewalk, she said. The shadowed stain would eventually run up the walls, along the fence and onto the house.
She said she grew up poor with six siblings, and she remembers her family’s move out of the “ghetto” by the first time her father bought her a pack of colored paper.
“I’m going to hide it in my dresser drawer, and no one is going to touch it!” Lek said. “We were finally able to afford crayons and colored pencils.”
After high school graduation, she decided to pursue her creativity, knowing she would not be happy without art, “the byproduct of her life.”
Lek is developing experimental, self-expressive abstracts, moving away from her typical attempts at clean imagery.
Last semester, Lek was accustomed to the praise of her works from professors and colleagues, but struggled to find satisfaction from within.
“Visually [the paintings] were beautiful, but they’re not doing anything but that,” said Lek. “I want [them] to be active; I want [them] to have a conversation between you and the painting.”
Each splash of oil and each cathartic brushstroke speak of Lek’s day-to-day run-ins with life. Her introspective take on authenticity has become the vessel through which Lek finds inspiration to create.
“You have to throw all of the bullsh-t on the canvas,” said Lek. “When you’re done, does it really read about the bullsh-t you were going through that day? That’s where I’m at now.”
Her plan is to showcase these pieces next semester at a BFA senior solo show held on upper campus between FA1 and FA2.
Beyond CSULB, Lek said that she hopes to continue her studies at a New York graduate school on her search for self-realization, looking forward to experiencing total immersion into the east coast art-sphere.
“When I do art, it involves the lifestyle that [I’m] living; I don’t want to be comfortable,” Lek said. “I need to find where I stand in the art institution because the entire adventure starts there.”