We recently connected with Joan Lesikin and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Joan, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I moved to Hendersonville, NC six years ago, not knowing anyone. But I knew that nearby, Black Mountain and Asheville, had history and an ongoing interest in the arts. Yet I had no gallery representation here (not for lack of trying). One day, walking the streets in downtown Hendersonville, I came across two artists who had adjacent studios one block behind Main Street. After a subsequent visit, I learned that one of the artists was leaving, her space would become available, and it was within my meager budget! Without any deliberation with family, I signed the lease and moved in. I had no idea if visitors, especially art lovers would find our adjacent locations, but the remaining artist and I drafted an official opening plan and signage. Since I’m a slow, slow art producer, I knew I would open for only two or three days, so that I could continue to work in my home studio and my new collaborator would be there on different days. Luckily a doorway connecting our two spaces made it possible for us to show each other’s work. The signs worked, and slowly more and more people have found us.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a painter. Sometimes I draw too. I’ve been focused on a series “Bodyscapes” for several years. The paintings and drawings are of people reclining under a striped cloth. As the idea developed, I added skies so the covered figures became mountains and valleys yet were still resting figures under a blanket. Cloth has traditionally been paintings’ backdrop or decorative element. In representational painting especially, viewers see fabrics as clothing, as coverings on tables and chairs, and as wallpaper, tapestry, and carpet on walls and floors. Fabrics provide us with a rich background of a prevailing cultural, historical, and socioeconomic representation to help complete a pictorial narrative. I instead bring the cloth to the foreground.
These draped human forms seem like the hills and valleys of my native NY Hudson River Valley and where I now live in the mountains of western North Carolina. Each artwork is a dual experience: an exploration of hills and valleys of landscape and of crevices and curves of the covered human form.
My work uses the traditional rectangular format as well as diptychs and triptychs of equal or different sized parts that are touching, apart, or sometimes asymmetrically positioned from each other (see below left). These multiples create elongated, unusual shapes and large scale formats to lead the eye to and beyond the canvases’ edges and distinctly configured space.
I have also broken the traditional rectangular format by building shaped frames around rectangular stretched canvas. On some, the shape derives from rick-rack trim of my grandmother’s aprons (see above center).
Besides asymmetrical multiples of the rectangular format and shaped frames, some of my new work explores using color differently than before and incorporating text in various ways.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I have had to pivot my art career several times since it’s been hard as a woman artist to get sufficient recognition, opportunities to be represented, and sufficient earnings although I’ve had several galleries handle my work through the years in NYC, Boca Raton, and elsewhere. I tried teaching art and commercial art. Finally I returned to school and earned a doctorate. I became a college professor. But one day, I broke down and realized that I was a frustrated artist and wanted to return to doing artwork, if not full time, at least for more than I was doing. So I moved where costs were lower, taught part-time, and lived more simply, in order to paint. But I was on a mountain in New York state where winters were very cold. And that’s how I got to the mountains of North Carolina!

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

The best source of new clients has been out-of-townees who come to Hendersonville during spring, summer, and fall.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.Lesikin.com
• Instagram: joanlesikin