The Secret Life of Lance Letscher is a deeply personal and psychological portrait of internationally known, and Austin based, collage artist Lance Letscher. Told through memories of trauma and triumph, the film provides a doorway into Letscher’s profound insights on creativity, the subconscious, work ethic and spirituality. Through his intricate artistic process, we witness the artist’s unwavering determination to stay in the moment—free of mind, thought and preconception. Featuring detailed images of more than a hundred of his collages, sculptures, and installations, viewers are offered a visual feast while gaining intimate access into Letscher’s methodical techniques and brilliant mind.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT ART HAD NO PLACE ELSE TO GO, along comes Lance Letscher with collages that reignite the element of surprise that was the medium’s birthright. Opening today at Howard Scott Gallery is a body of work that is a magical blend of whimsy and grit.

Collage has been described as an art of interruption because of the medium’s abrupt breaks of texture, pattern and plane But for a young Texas artist juggling three jobs and family life in the early 1990s, the term meant something quite literal. Impelled by a fractured work schedule, Mr. Letscher set aside the conceptual sculpture he had been creating out of art school in the late 1980s and began cutting up small, simple drawings to explore pictorial ideas. Out of those casual improvisations have come inimitable and exciting collages.

Mr. Letscher builds on antic juxtapositions between simple shapes on backgrounds of faded text. He is a celebrant of found papers: scraps of handwritten letters, grocery lists, old diaries, ledgers and magazine clippings patinated with age. A fine colorist, he salvages used paperback and album covers (remember those?) for his palette, a kaleidoscope of scuffed color enlivened by fragments of printed text. Individual works are rich in intelligible content, delectable to the imagination and the eye.

He is not the only artist using cast-off books and papers but he is one of the very few whose modernity supersedes the nostalgia of old materials without sacrificing their elegiac power. Every appropriation of derelict scraps declares a sharp contemporary wit. But in Mr. Letscher’s hands, the declaration rises to a threnody for lives that left no monument, only accumulations of ephemera poised for dispersion.

This exhibition is a roller coaster ride of mood shifts, from playfulness to solemnity. Size ranges from small, lyrical page-sized works to a single monumental landscape. An exquisite color sense and empathy with his materials create coherence among dissimilar design motifs. These are the twin axes on which Mr. Letscher’s madcap poetry revolves.

“Lucky Cats” (2005) rises vertically like a jagged geological cut-away of the earth’s crust. Colors, sawed from book covers, are non-naturalistic. (Trace the movement of pieces of a “How to Tell Time” Golden Book or a post-war savings bond advertisement, each functioning as a tonal note.) Weight and depth are created by bonding items to a substrate that is lovingly cut and pieced back together like parts of a puzzle. A sliver of bold text signals the impulse behind the pictorial illusion: “ different conception of nature in the last four centuries.”

Elsewhere, American quilt patterns provide a design source similar to what the Cubists found in African masks. Visual repartee between a folk aesthetic and a cool, sly modern one is evident in the swirling pinwheels of “Key,” (2005); the elongated, asymmetrical play on the log cabin design in “Magic Gown,” (2005) and variations on that favorite old pattern, the box quilt. One collage sets small bars of color dancing above the logo of the Grolier Society; another turns mournful with black rectangles arranged in dignified sequence across the back of a severed book cover, the threads of its binding tied like winding cloths. The combinations are uncategorizable and captivating.

MARIO NAVES’S PAINTED AND PIECED ABSTRACT COLLAGES are on view now at Elizabeth Harris Gallery. To have his show overlapping with Lance Letscher’s—and in the same building—is a delicious convergence.

In his art, as in his critical writing, Mr. Naves’s primary concern is for the way a thing looks. He knows better than most that creative intuition, not theory, is the soul of art making. So much depends on the ways in which an artist’s hand serves or stymies sensibility. Both artist and critic, Mr. Naves knows from within how a hand functions as an extension of the eye. The refinement of his touch and the sensibility that drives it is a pleasure to see.

His collages maintain that sense of fluid movement, of form and color migrating across the canvas, characteristic of painting. Paint is dripped, scraped, scumbled, sponged, patted and brushed on pieces of paper that are then torn and rearranged. Mr. Naves’s technique preserves the accidental aspect of the painting process while it subordinates all randomness to the cognitive, disciplined basis of traditional painting. Texture derives from the quality of papers, their edges summoned to the surface by creases and folds. Brushwork is already dry when he begins to tear shapes and manipulate placement. It is a working method that permits him to concentrate on color and form separately from paint quality. Illusions of spontaneity arise from careful deliberation.

Accustomed to the intimacy of his earlier collages, I was jolted by the size of these pieces. The work’s aspiration to the condition of painting is more evident in this show than in previous ones because of the expanded dimensions. This more aggressive work requires greater viewing distance; from several feet away, each collage is easily taken for a painting. Color areas achieve a self-sufficiency that is less apparent in smaller works.

Compare “Voyeur” (2005) with the monumental “On High” (2005); the subtle discretions of the modestly sized piece give way to more assertive emphasis on the linear edge of painted shapes in the colossus. With expanded measure come a heightened chromatic sharpness and bolder gestures, such as the whirl of broadly brushed dark pigment that dominates “Green Earth” (2005).

I miss the quietude of his smaller work but that is only personal preference. Overall sensuousness, color harmonies and alchemy of composition are constants.

In the summers of his youth, Lance Letscher cleaned out vacated rental properties owned by his grandparents in northeast Texas. The expanse of grazing pasture and cotton fields resurfaces in his intricate, geometric collages, along with a curious habit of imagining other people’s lives from the traces left behind. His landscape compositions, sometimes mural-sized, recall Paul Klee paintings, aerial photographs, or stratigraphic maps, charged with a certain psychological resonance.

Trained as a printmaker at the University of Texas, Letscher starts with an intuitive sense of palette and scale. He prospects thrift stores, junk shops, and used bookshelves for old ledgers, notebooks, diaries, handwritten lists, letters, and recipe cards. Boxes of antique papers line his worktable. Sliced into strips, squares, or wedges and embedded in crystalline patterns, they become both shards of memory and the puzzle pieces of new fictional narratives, the clues barely legible.

An analogy to quilt making is apt. Hours poring over his wife’s collection of quilt blocks and patterns, as well as an eclectic stash of art books, inform both process and image, leading Letscher from one collage to the next. The challenge of breaking up predictable structure erupts in riffs on color, texture, and sheen, as seen in Red Bar. In the collages, the artist often contrasts nuances in thickness and commercial printing, selecting worn record jackets and pulp paperback covers with bent corners or the bright candy colors of children’s storybooks.

Recent works such as White Flag use juxtapositions and layering to create complex optical illusions. Letscher describes the floating pointed ellipses as “specks you see on a sugar-low.” Another strategy involves chopping up and reconfiguring pattern elements in order to achieve a dense, syncopated harmony, for example in In a Hopeful Way.

Letscher arrived at collage after making stone sculpture and wood constructions. He began cutting out and superimposing small realistic drawings of tree branches on cardboard for depth, then working with monochromatic book pages. His current work has propelled him beyond the sphere of Austin, Texas, to a New York debut at Howard Scott Gallery in Chelsea.

From Pablo Picasso to Kurt Schwitters, collage became a modernist vehicle for transforming mundane castoffs into art and fusing reality with abstraction.

In Lance Letscher’s hands, the medium achieves a new tension between precisionist patterning and the stuff of ordinary life. His prolific and growing body of work exhibits the elegance of a haiku or an Amish quilt crafted from vivid bits of memory and time into a classic form.
—Pamela Scheinman

Pamela Scheinman teaches in the Department of Art & Design at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

Lance Letscher: The Perfect Machine

April 2 – May 15, 2010

Artists’ Reception: April 2, 5:30 – 7:30 pm

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Lance Letscher: The Perfect Machine.

Letscher harvests defaced textbooks, children’s readers, vintage album covers, magazine clippings, handwritten notes, recipe cards, business ledgers, and other bits of found paper from closeout bins, yard sales and the dumpster behind a nearby used book and record store in his native Austin. In his studio, the artist winnows through and organizes these odds and ends, cuts them into strips and shapes and then pieces together the scraps of paper into remarkable collages.

Letscher’s works are largely abstract and characterized by dense texture, color and pattern. They are rich and vigorous and compellingly complex. The formal appeal of the work is enriched by the memories and emotional associations evoked by the artist’s raw materials. Fragmented illustrations and dissected words and phrases hint at potential narratives. Collectors of his art tend to be passionate about it and frequently cite its honesty and the rewards it offers to prolonged and repeat viewing.

Letscher is inspired by Outsider Art and the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers, as well as three Austrian artists – Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and Friedensreich Hundertwasser – but has few direct influences from the history of collage and assemblage. And as his interests and skills develop over time, Letscher’s work has evolved notably.

“…One thing you learn quickly when searching for ‘rules’ in Letscher’s work is that no sooner do you think you have uncovered one than you find it contradicted,” writes Charles Dee Mitchell in his introduction to the recent monograph Lance Letscher: Collage.

Creating a 9 x 12 foot collage commissioned for the Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas is an experience that Letscher credits with shaping his latest body of work.

“I started thinking about kids as my audience,” Letscher said. “It started to influence the vocabulary I was using.”

The works in The Perfect Machine reflect this shift to a “storybook perspective.” Letscher’s colorful and dazzling abstractions have expanded to include more recognizable forms and childhood imagery. Fittingly, the exhibition at Eight Modern coincides with the publication of a children’s book written and illustrated by the artist, also entitled The Perfect Machine, about a young inventor’s quest to figure out the perfect machine.

“It used to be all chance and discovery,” Letscher said. “Now I am orchestrating what I want, instead of what I have happened to find.”

Letscher was trained as a printmaker and ran the wood-shop at the University of Texas art school, where he received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. He attracted notice in the 1980s Dallas art scene for his small sculptures of wood and marble, before transitioning to drawing and then collage.

He has been exhibited throughout the United States, as well as in Paris, Berlin, Munich, Barcelona, London and Poland. In 2004, a solo retrospective of the artist’s work entitled Books and Parts of Books: 1996-2004 traveled to four museums.

Santa Fe Reporter
By: John Photos
Published April 2008

Collage may be the most relevant medium for contemporary culture.  The cutting up and repurposing of discarded and obsolete print media is the artist’s version of recycling and sustainability.  It reflects thriftiness, a clever way to pinch pennies in a time of job instability and tightened belts. But collage also is a distillation of the way we consume information in pieces and without much context. From playlists to video clips to “news” websites that cater to demographics, information is as modular and customizable as any other possession.

That said, due to its dependence on paper, collage might also be one of the least relevant mediums. Now that the iPad is finally out, I don’t think it will be long before print media is viewed as hopelessly static and, from an environmental standpoint, deeply unethical. Some people will hang on to books as a sort of novelty (“books have a warmer voice”), but most anything with pages will be out on the curb. When this happens, don’t be surprised if you see Lance Letscher out there pawing through your stuff.

Letscher is a collage artist and, as one might expect, a major component of his practice is the collecting of raw material.  Stories abound about favorite Austin, Texas, dumpsters into which he dives. He is a one-man salvage yard, rescuing the things that can’t even be donated in order to use them for parts. From the look of his works, his collection is extensive.

In a strange act of symmetry, Letscher puts out print media of his own. His solo exhibition, The Perfect Machine, coincides with the release of Letscher’s book of the same name.  On view at Eight Modern are the original works that were created to accompany the story he wrote about a boy who sets out to make the eponymous contraption.

The publication is billed as a children’s book, but the imagery, which ranges from abstract to wildly abstract, may prove difficult to interpret. It requires a good imagination, to say the least, to reconcile what is depicted with what the story claims is depicted. Hopefully, kids will be drawn to Letscher’s kinetic style, which resembles nothing so much as the limitless permutations of Legos. I say hopefully because the story presents some complex ideas very simply. Really, The Perfect Machine is a celebration of the artistic impulse and the creative mind.

Letscher’s work is exemplary for its lack of cohesion. When I think of collage, it is typically an attempt to produce something new, something whole, from disparate parts. A lot of its power comes from unexpected juxtapositions and combinations of elements. Its use of existing and recognizable forms translates well to political satire or critique.  Connotations are almost unavoidable. Yet, Letscher’s works are disjointed enough that they are not always readable as images. They appear, very matter-of-factly, as piles of cut paper and cardboard. Often they are suggestive of architecture but, for the most part, they look like little more than scattered parts, like someone sneezed on a jigsaw puzzle. Even the frantic use of typography is emptied of meaning, relegated to pattern and texture.

Even so, the works have a sense of depth that is impressive and fairly complex, mixing perspectival elements, such as vanishing points, and patterns that serve as backdrops, highlighting the figure-ground relationship. Formally, the work owes as much to abstract painting as it does to other collage. Letscher prefers lines and shapes of solid color to pictures, patching together his own forms that veer and wobble like an old barn.

In one image is a scrap from an old instruction manual for Tinker Toys. This is fitting, as it nicely sums up Letscher’s process; his use of simple parts and imaginative play are childishly brilliant.

Austin artist Lance Letscher’s latest children’s book is “The Perfect Machine” (2010, University of Texas Press, Austin) and that is — no coincidence, obviously—the title of the exhibition of 17 recent Letscher collages opening at Eight Modern today.

The book didn’t influence his art, except indirectly.  He says doing a 9-by-12-foot commissioned mural for the Dell Children’s Medical Center of central Texas focused his art, “I started thinking about kids as my audience.  It started to influence the vocabulary I was using,” Letscher said.  “It used to be all chance and discovery.  Now I am orchestrating what I want, instead of what I happened to find.”

In the contemporary art market, Letscher, 48, is an emerging superstar, with recent solo shows in galleries from Seattle to Paris to Barcelona.  In his native town, he sometimes is called “the other Lance” in deference to cyclist Lance Armstrong, and a Letscher show in Austin reportedly always brings out the collectors to see his latest work.  “People are crazy about Letscher’s engaging yet elusive collages that are delicately crafted,” Austin American Statesman art critic Jeanne Claire van Ryzin wrote in 2004, “People just can’t stop buying Letscher’s collages, small or large, subtle or strong.”

The exhibition at Eight Modern is his first Santa Fe show.  His intense, complex, dense and abstract collages celebrate both wall hangings and found objects like guns and books.  Almost all of his media are recycled.  He harvests defaced textbooks, children’s readers, vintage album covers, magazine clippings, handwritten notes, recipe cards, business ledgers and other bits of found paper from closeout bins, yard sales and the Dumpster behind a nearby used book and record store.  In his studio, Letscher winnows the materials and organizes odds and ends, cutting them into strips and shapes and then piecing the scraps of paper into collages.

“I use found paper, book covers, old magazines, record covers, etc., to make my work,” he said.  “I am particularly attracted to worn surfaces, odd colors and obsolete typefaces.  I am primarily concerned with formal issues—the interaction of color, spatial shifts and compositional dynamics, and how these things can generate content.”

Eight Modern director Jaquelin Loyd clearly is a Letscher fan.  “His works are largely abstract and characterized by dense texture, color and pattern,” she said.  “They are rich and vigorous and compellingly complex.  The formal appeal of the work is enriched by the memories and emotional associations evoked by his raw materials.  Fragmented illustrations and dissected words and phrases hint at potential narratives.”  The works in “The Perfect Machine” reflect his shift to a “storybook perspective.”  His abstractions have expanded to include more recognizable forms and childhood imagery.

Psychological Resonance
In his teen summers, Letscher cleaned vacated rental properties owned by his grandparents in northeastern Texas.  The expanse of grazing pasture and cotton fields has resurfaced from time to time on his intricate and geometric collages.  His sometimes mural-size compositions have a psychological resonance, as if he were recalling people’s lives.

The artist’s work evolves constantly.  “One thing you learn quickly when searching for ‘rules’ in Letscher’s work is that no sooner do you think you have uncovered one than you find it contradicted,” art critic Charles Dee Mitchell wrote in his introduction to a recent monograph, “Lance Letscher: Collage.”

Formally trained as a printmaker at the University of Texas, where he received his bachelor’s and master’s in Fine Arts degress, Letscher ran the woodshop at UT-Austin for a number of years.  He began attracting attention in the 1980s Dallas art scene for his small sculptures of wood and marble, before transitioning to drawing and then collage.  He basically taught himself, cutting out and superimposing small, realistic drawings of tree branches on cardboard for depth, and then working with monochromatic book pages.
He has said he is inspired by three Austrian artists: Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and Friedensreich Hundertwasser, as well as “outsider art” and the Gee’s Bend quilt-makers.  He has few direct influences from the history of collage and assemblage, but the references to quilts can be seen more clearly.  Letscher’s wife is a quilter, and he has acknowledged poring over her collection of quilt blocks and patterns.

Letscher has been exhibited widely throughout the U.S., as well as in Paris, Berlin, Munich, Barcelona, London and Poland.  In 2004, a solo retrospective of his work called “Books and Parts of Books, 1996-2004” traveled to four museums.  His work will be at Eight Modern through May 15.

AMERICAN-STATESMAN
By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Publish June 12, 2004

Lance Fever has struck Austin again.

No, not the excitement that every summer surrounds cycling champion Lance Armstrong when he races in the Tour de France.

This brand of Lance Fever surrounds artist Lance Letscher, the 42-year-old native Austinite who in the past half dozen years or so has emerged as one of the most popular — and most collected — artists in Austin. Now, thanks to an eight-year survey of his work at the Austin Museum of Art and a simultaneous show of new work at D. Berman Gallery, Lance Fever is once again running at full throttle.

Simply put: People are crazy about Letscher’s engaging yet elusive collages that are delicately crafted from scraps of old paper and books. In the studio adjoining his Central Austin home, Letscher splices together, with a surgeon’s precision, often tiny fragments of old handwritten letters, lists, recipes and ledgers and also vintage printed materials such as books and magazines. Then, he merges these scraps into either recognizable images (landscapes or botanical studies) or into abstract patterns and shapes. Some are small and jewel-like; others span several feet in length. Some are sinewy symphonies of delicate lines or intricate fugues of geometric shapes; others bedazzle with blocks of saturated color, dizzying pinwheels or sweeping ellipses.

People just can’t stop buying Letscher’s collages, small or large, subtle or strong.

Of the 30 new ones in the D. Berman exhibit, 12 sold before the show opened. Since then, another 11 have sold along with a good-sized handful of Letscher’s older works and he’s received two commissions from private collectors. (Letscher’s collages range in price from under $1,000 to $10,000.)

And people clamor just to see Letscher’s colorful, tactile art, too. So many people tried to get a sneak peek of Letscher’s new work while the folks at Fine Arts Services were framing it that visitors were turned away. More than once, associate gallery director Anatasia Budziszewski has arrived in the morning to find people waiting in front of the Guadalupe Street gallery for the doors to open.

“They know it, they love it and they just can’t wait to see it,” she says. At the museum, on the first day the Letscher exhibit was open to the public, 150 people came through the doors.

Not that all the success has made Letscher a wealthy man. A University of Texas art school alum and father of two sons, Letscher has only in the last three years or so been lucky enough to derive his income solely from sales of his art. For year, he supervised the wood shop at UT’s art school and worked for artist Amado Peña and his fine art print business.

It’s not just Austin that has Lance Fever. In 2002, Letscher had his first New York solo show at Howard Scott Gallery. It got rave reviews from the usually tough New York critics. And it sold out. A solo show in Munich last year sold well, as did shows at Houston’s Roni McMurtry Gallery and at Dallas’ Conduit Gallery.

So what is so compelling about Letscher’s collages? Why do people — not just wealthy collectors, but artists and folks with modest means, too — snatch them up?

Some suggest that it’s their mesmerizing quality — that, given our natural curiosity and our inborn desire to connects bits and put them into a whole, we just can’t stop being transfixed by their pattern and complexity.

“They reward prolonged looking,” says Austin-based artist Will Klemm. “They never wear off.” Klemm, whose own softly defined landscape paintings are much-loved and much-collected, says that after seeing Letscher’s 2001 solo show at D. Berman he was so charmed and taken he did something he’d never done before: “I made my first fan call to an artist.” Now, Klemm owns six of Letscher’s works. “Lance’s works are completely sincere –there’s nothing pretentious about them,” says Klemm. “They’re products of a very earnest visual intelligence at play.”

Klemm is not the only popular and esteemed Texas artist who is drawn to the sincerity of Letscher’s work; Austin painter Julie Speed is, too, and she lent one of the two Letscher works she owns to the museum exhibit. “I think the reasons why collectors flock to buy Lance’s work are simple,” she says. “Most of all, it is honest work. He is following his own path. There is a sense of quiet strength, not bombast. His is not a one-note message which, once read, can then be dispensed with.”

Of course, others find themselves viscerally attracted to the multi-layered effect in Letscher’s work. There’s an immediate graphic grab to them that pulls the viewer in. On close inspection, details of the vintage paper are revealed: words, numbers, dates. Then step back, and you might realize that the image is actually an abstract landscape.

Mary Stephenson first discovered Letscher’s collages about three years ago; now she owns five. “I love the idea that there’s something under what you see at first, like a palimpsest,” she says. On her modest salary as the director of volunteer services at Hospice Austin, Stephenson has to stretch her budget to accommodate her Lance passion. “But I like that I have art that’s taken me longer to pay off than my refrigerator,” she says. “(Art) is a diversion that keeps me rich.”

Lance Letscher’s new show is an array of his familiar collage style in two dimensions and of iconic objects of adventure (pistols, a full-size motorcycle), expanding the artist’s scope of expression by way of illustrating his first children’s book, The Perfect Machine.

Letscher’s work, long a sort of paper kaleidoscope of broken text and images built from butchered books and other bastions of print arranged in seemingly obsessive patterns, makes the leap from flat ground only after exploding on that surface. The narrative of The Perfect Machineis vividly captured by what are possibly Letscher’s most representational creations thus far, with shards of color and typography and hacked images streaming from the young protagonist’s head–or where a head or body, occluded by the stunning graphic tumult, might be.

Before images can stream forth, of course, before they’re displayed with the meticulous vigor common in Letscher’s work, images or the idea of images tend to remain locked within a creator’s head. This seems to be the message behind the wide piece called Talking Cure, where dozens of boxes of many colors cover the white ground, waiting only for the therapy of art or something more clinical to unlock them and unpack them and let the contents flow toward greater relief if not actual glory. With this exhibit, though, we suggest one could make a case for glory.

Just seeing these mostly two-dimensional works displayed on the gallery’s walls, observing the brilliantly collaged objects drawing light to their jarring depths, we wouldn’t think they were part of a sequential tale, much less one intended for children. But then, we wouldn’t think that other than the luckiest child in the world—or the most discerning collector—would be gifted with the knowledge of a collection like this.

Austin Chronicle
BY MADELINE IRVINE
Published June 25, 2004

What lies behind the buzz of Austin’s hot collage artist

Lance Letscher has more than buzz going on; he has mystique workin’, too. The buzz comes from Letscher’s art: poetic collages concocted from “found” papers – album covers, books, handwritten recipes, notes, and magazine clippings among them – which are meticulously cut and arranged into intriguing patterns and textures that open up worlds of thoughts and associations. It’s part of what’s led the Austin-born and -bred artist to have two shows up in town simultaneously: “Books and Parts of Books: 1996-2004,” a traveling survey at the Austin Museum of Art, and “Provisional Beauty” at D Berman Gallery. The pairing is brilliant: One can see and trace the artist’s progress – and wonder where it will go next, as Letscher is barely in midcareer.

The mystique – a mixture of mystery and reverence – is that of a reticent, reclusive artist. Letscher generates mystery simply by being himself: a low-key, quiet person who lets his art do the talking for him, unless you ask him a direct question. Then he answers thoughtfully and thoroughly but without letting his focus wander. That focus is a key component of his idiosyncratic work, which started earning reverence, or respect, from the moment it first made a splash in the Texas art world as meticulous and fragile sculpture. Then, and ever since, Letscher has worked on his art assiduously, even while holding down other jobs and raising a family. Those years may have limited the amount of work he was able to send out into the world, but that added to the mystique. These days, Letscher’s shows are a sea of red dots – the art world’s discreet “sold” sign.

Thanks to those red dots, Letscher has been able to work full time on his art for the past three years. Daily he travels from his home in Central Austin to his studio in a two-story addition that juts out into his back yard. The bright, uncluttered work space has gauzy curtains that soften the sunlight and allow glimpses of a field of green lawn, as well as trees and leaves just a touch away. Inside, massive worktables line the walls, with books and magazines in stacks and boxes tucked underneath. These piles of future fodder are Letscher’s archives, sitting in shadow, awaiting their turn to come into play on the light-table tops above. There, Letscher culls the chaos by sorting and selecting, cutting, slicing, and arranging the pieces into collages that have a precision akin to microscopic focus. Letscher only includes the essential; there is nothing extraneous.

“Books and Parts of Books” catches Letscher in midstream. He was just out of graduate school in the late 1980s when the Dallas art scene took notice of his small sculptures. Unfortunately, they took an extraordinary amount of time to make, and without the luxury of time that grad school provides, just creating new pieces became a challenge. And though they were quite heavy, they were also fragile. Galleries were reluctant to handle Letscher’s work. By the early Nineties, he had reached “a critical mass of frustration” with the situation, so while working three jobs, Letscher started making “simple, small drawings to work through ideas – cutting them out and superimposing one upon another to get more density and depth. That’s how the collages started,” he says.

Works relating to those first efforts – delicate landscape drawings with collage elements – can be seen at AMOA. These are reminiscent of an Asian sensibility, evoking the vastness of nature in a spare drawing of a single tree carefully placed on a monochromatic ground.

Drawing has always been a part of Letscher’s life. His mother, who preceded Lance to UT art school, gave her kids art supplies for their birthdays and for Christmas. Letscher remembers that making art was “a foundational element of my personality.” At UT, Letscher found the medium of printmaking to be a natural extension for his drawing skills, and through it he developed his understanding of color, particularly “color harmonies, mixing, and balance.”

After graduation, Letscher worked for Amado Peña, an artist known for his Southwestern-style prints. This put Letscher in a master-apprentice workshop situation, which was for him an invaluable learning experience, in both applying color and watching a commercially successful artist at work in the world. “There is a definite art to marketing your work and presenting yourself in a professional way,” says Letscher. “A lot of artists have a romantic or bohemian attitude to their work. It may work in the studio, but it doesn’t work when approaching galleries.” Letscher now has work in about 10 galleries, stretching from San Francisco to Albuquerque, New York to Munich.

Letscher credits his time with Peña with teaching him how to navigate the commercial steps to success. Early on, he committed to gallery affiliations in Dallas and Houston, and after a number of years, this led to notice by the Howard Scott Gallery in NYC. That’s when his work really began to take off, although the artist himself cannot parse out the precise reasons for his success. Showing in New York at a good gallery that published a small catalog just put his work at “the next level,” where it began receiving critical attention.

Letscher notes, however, that the work itself also changed at that point, which is what makes it hard for him to identify exactly why his sales changed. He did notice that the buzz got louder because of his sold-out New York show and that “more people buy because things are happening” in the artist’s career.

If we let the buzz take over, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that there would be no buzz without the art. Watching the work change and grow and develop is one of the pleasures of seeing Letscher’s current shows in tandem. In time, his elegant drawings developed into much more colorful abstract works, rich in complexity and texture. He became interested in pattern and pattern-based structures, often reminiscent of quilts, which were part of Letscher’s inspiration. He was attracted to “the parallel [between] fabric design and quilt making – [it was] handmade and expressive but anonymous and utilitarian. I like that aesthetic, the modesty in that.

“When something is designed as a utilitarian object, decisions are made in its construction that give it a voice – what fabrics are available – and I am trying to invest the work with a structure that has an underlying logic of craft that is expressive of something else: a personal and intimate experience in making it,” reflects the artist. “It is an intuition I have; it is not completely conscious.”

And there is an integrity to Letscher’s materials. He uses “found” paper, art-world shorthand for materials that were created for another purpose and often were manufactured. In Letscher’s case, “retrieved” paper is more specific to his process. He collects and is given discarded objects of a certain age: books, LPs, typefaces, handwritten pages full of notes, lists, recipes, letters – many of them from commercially printed sources and reflecting the popular culture of their time. Letscher considers these materials his palette, the base source from which he weaves his spell. As with quilts, it may be the familiarity of the materials that adds to his work’s broad appeal.

More recently, the artist finds himself rooted in color, though not in the typical, painterly sense. “I’ve been trying to have color carry the emotional atmosphere,” he says. “I would like to make things that are mysteriously powerful. I’d like to make a nonconscious communication that people feel and can’t put their fingers on.” Letscher wants his work to work for people who are not indoctrinated into art; he wants to reach people who are not in the art world, “everyday people – those are the people I want to impress.”

Given Letscher’s track record, it’s clear that his work impresses many people. Clearly, it appeals to people who love detail, who love to connect the dots and free associate, to read things into the work. It offers them many layers, each containing different aspects of the artist’s personality, and the closer they get to it, the more rewards the work delivers. In Modern Farmer, now on view at D Berman Gallery, multicolored ovals hover atop a magazine cover, but one cream-colored paper oval is carefully cut so these words can be read:

“Help Session
MWF 2-5pm
Room 225 A”

Read into that what you will; Letscher’s humor sneaks up on you.

Queis a simple and profound piece composed of large and small vertical rectangles linked together in pairs by a thin black line. They are arranged on a tea-colored ground and function almost as a set of notes. This piece creates synesthesia – just by looking at it, the piece generates a recollection of resonant sound in me.

Angular Landscape, on the other hand, is purely abstract. The blocks of greens and reds and earth colors jostling one another are like bedrock undergoing enormous change – cracking, swaying, quaking – yet not falling into chaos. Instead, they are still constructive building blocks, actively rearranging themselves beneath our feet. In a way, this piece depicts the artist in relation to his buzzing audience: Letscher is the bedrock, constantly morphing into new forms, while viewers delight in seeing and participating in what was once hidden, out of sight and out of mind.

This sense of a life force in action is inherent in working with paper. It is a medium that breathes; it bends and curls or stiffens, responding to changes in the air, its temperature and humidity. That the paper he uses is from a time past is another key to the artist’s sensibility. Letscher doesn’t belong to our fast and furious, go-ahead, get-ahead world. It is not just that his work refers to an earlier, more grounded era; the stream he connects with seems timeless.

Letscher’s artwork is a heady mix of instinct, thought, play, and deep feelings. His intriguing images activate the reflective in viewers, who connect to their own feelings and memories, perhaps even more than to the delight in the eye-catching colors, patterns, and textures that formally compose the works. This ability to send viewers on memory trips is key to Letscher’s success and a reason why many of his admirers have purchased more than one Letscher work.

In the end, buzz around an artist comes and goes, and mystique fades over time. But once it leaves the studio, art lives a life of its own. Obviously, Letscher’s work appeals to something deep in people that makes them want to have the objects he makes in their everyday lives. When asked what he thinks interests people in his work, the artist says simply, “The one thing that people respond to is the human element.”

“Books and Parts of Books: 1996-2004” runs through Aug. 29 at the Austin Museum of Art, 823 Congress, “Provisional Beauty” runs through July 3 at D Berman Gallery, 1701 Guadalupe.

A walk past timber skeletons and heavy machinery, through the dust and haze of waning afternoon sunrays, up the narrow staircase above the carpenter shop and directly into other people’s lives – a chaotic lexicon of thousands of pieces scattered, stacked, filed, layered, lost and found, trimmed, sliced, and glued pieces of lives waiting for resurrection.

Lance Letscher assembles and reassembles this universe into a carnival of collaged art exhibited throughout galleries in the United States and Europe as well as in several books. But perhaps none of those showcases feeling quite so viscerally present and immediate than the infinite pieces of pieces surrounding us covering every surface in the studio.

Where do you find your materials?

For a long time, it was certain dumpsters; half price books etc. The stuff that gets thrown away usually is the material that has the qualities that attract me the most:wear, grime from long use and handling, marks and doodles etc. At one point, maybe fifteen or twelve years ago, I would drop my younger son into the container and point and he would do the dirty work. He’s 20 now, but a couple of years ago he gave some girl a waffle iron that he snagged on “big trash pickup day”. She wasn’t as happy about it as he was.

Do you think the materials guide your work — which is stronger: the identity of the materials you work with or your artistic will?

The work guides the work and the material choices. I am a disciple of “the unseen hand”. I am all about working in a way that takes as much of the control away from my conscious mind as possible. It (the work) has a life of it’s own, I just try to stay out of the way as much as possible. The “dreaming mind” is much more powerful than the “thinking mind”.

Do you feel that your work preserves the elements it’s made of?  Is there something that attests to the past life of those materials or do they become fundamentally altered to where they’re no longer meaningful as anything other than the new whole which you’ve created?

I love the traces of other peoples lives and thoughts that become a patina on the stuff I use. Especially when I see things that little kids did in books 50 or 100 years ago. They were bored and, I think, more creative because of it. At one point, I stopped listening to the radio while I worked (I work alone) to promote a more profound sense of boredom which I hoped would improve the work.

The work did get better, but it has made me into a very dull person, especially socially. If you have ever seen the Philip Guston painting where he shows himself as a giant grotesque eye – you can grow an eye like that if you are willing to force yourself to abide in this level of absolute and excruciating boredom. It is very dangerous though. There comes a certain point when you would do anything to escape…this is partly the reason for the high levels of drug abuse and alcoholism in creatives. Plus, the big eye takes an enormous amount of energy to run.

When you finish a piece do you generally end up with what you envisioned at the start or is it something completely different?

I never pre – plan. If I accidentally do, I sabotage it when I am fully committed.

Because your work is made up of pre-existing pieces, do you feel that it’s wholly your own or is it a collaboration with some unseen partners?

I pray alot.

Describe the process or steps involved in physically making a typical piece?

Gather material into piles according to something; color or whatever. The piles = the pallet. Cut pieces to make parts. Assemble the parts or components from the cut pieces. Glue, press and re cut the parts to their finished shape. Assemble the parts into a preliminary composition without glue. Mess with that part until the composition starts to become interesting. Transfer the parts onto a board with glue and press. Allow several days drying time. About three quarters of the time, I end up cropping or cutting to re assemble after it is dry and I can really see what it looks like. This requires a table saw since the piece is backed with wood at this point. Usually, I work on several similar sized and themed pieces at the same time, so I have more raw material to work with when it’s “table saw” time.

If you look closely at some of my work, you might notice that the backing board is sometimes five or six layers thick. Each re assembly requires a new solid backing board (glued and pressed again)to hold everything together. The thicker ones were harder to resolve. I don’t really have any other trade secrets. Change your blade often. Cut away from yourself.

Do you sketch out ideas regularly and, if so, how many of those become a finished piece?

No, never, none.

In one sense you have a great degree of geometric precision in your work but on the other hand you also hand-make everything so there’s an inherent impreciseness as well.  Could you comment on that dichotomy?

Within every man, a war rages between the forces of good and evil, darkness and light. At stake in this battle are the mind, personality and soul. My work is about this interior landscape and drama. Sounds corny or ironic, but really that is the crux of life that runs the gamut from the very mundane tensions and challenges to full blown emotional and psychological crisis that we all have (or will) experience. I heard a primitive Pentecostal preacher on the radio over twenty years ago say it this way (I’ll paraphrase but it stuck with me) – The universe is vast and probably teeming with life both superior and inferior to our own species. But there is one important fact that distinguishes the Earth from all of the other planets in all of the innumerable solar systems in our infinite universe. The Earth is the planet that Satan fell into after his rebellion. This is the land that he inhabits and prowls. And this is where we abide as well.

In many of your pieces there’s also an absolute chaotic overload and destruction of precision in the composition but the pieces are often things associated with precise mechanisms (gears, ladders, tools). What is the idea you’re exploring there?

Ditto. Some of the “building” pieces are more simple in regards to this dynamic. They are dysfunctional models that have a feeling of precarious equilibrium that I really identify with and see as a very prevalent state.

What attracts you to typography and letterforms and what is the meaning for you in their reassembled, somewhat abstracted, finished products? Do you intentionally strip the meaning of words by re purposing the building blocks from which they’re made?

I think that the use of letters has started to function in several different ways in the work. At first, it was about chaotic and incomplete thinking (this also applies to the question about gears and ladders). A lot of the pieces are maps or diagrams of mental or psychological disjunction and disassociation. This isn’t really a conscious choice of direction, but it is a definite theme in the more recent work. The other thing that some of the letter pieces do is set up a “teasing” dynamic with the viewer. I wanted to hint at certain words or phrases and then undermine that momentum with a lack of completion or a change in direction or expression, mid word or thought. So, yes, I think that you hit the nail on the head.

There seems to be the touch of a child in a lot of your work… be it through the scribbled drawings or the cutouts from what seem like educational books. Is there some inspiration from your childhood or the ways in which a child perceives the world that you’re translating?

No I think that it is more about the expression. Children tend to be expressionists first, but it is often dismissed as poor mechanics or skill. Same goes for the art of the psychotic.

How do you feel about the state of contemporary art?  Is it a time of vibrancy where more artists are living from their work or is it more of a struggle than in the past?

Art magazines are extremely depressing. Making  a living from your work in no way serves as an indicator of quality or substance or achievement. The real struggle is the same – how to be creative without being imitative, how to avoid apathy, confusion, complacency or self sabotage. How can a person with profoundly limited resources create something that is meaningful, long lasting and maybe transcendent? If you are really going to do something important..make real art, how do you do it and how can you keep doing it over time with the hope that it might get better. If there is a “struggle” involved in being an artist, I think it is more about those issues; interior issues as opposed to the exterior endorsements or criticism.

Where do you go or what do you do for inspiration when you’re jonesin?

Motorcycle magazines. I like the design/art/culture mags like “DAMn” too. I usually just start moving my hands and putting stuff together and then I’m ok.

When you think ahead to the future, what are some things you’re looking forward to accomplishing?

I used to want to win a Macarthur fellowship really bad, but I quit thinking about those things at some point …I guess I want my work to get better. The future is never what you think it’s going to be.

Jackson Hole Weekly
By Aaron Wallis
Published Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Jackson Hole, Wyo.—I recently spoke to Austin, Texas artist Lance Letscher about his upcoming exhibition at Tayloe Piggott Gallery. The gallery press release described Letscher’s work as “drawing comparisons to James Castle, Josef Albers and Piet Mondrian.” That’s a tall order to fill. Though the artist was himself quite modest, polite and almost embarrassed by the comparison.

Letscher’s work consists of multi-layered, almost sculptural, collages assembled from a wide array of paper sources, then glued to masonite. I don’t really see any similarity to James Castle, known for using spit and charcoal. Albers not so much either – there are squares in the works of both, but Albers focuses on subtle variations in color perception. Mondrian paints squares too, but his are flat and in only primary colors. The first comparison that springs to my mind is No. 5 by Charles Demuth. Though that comparison is really only applicable to Letscher’s work involving intricate circular pie patterns repeated in varying colors.

Letscher says he does not look for direct inspiration from other artists, but rather tries to let process and method dictate the evolution of a piece. His early work as a sculptor, while still in grad school, still seems to influence his 2D work. American folk art quilts could also be cited as a distinct influence. The pieces are wonderfully complex with layers of collaged paper from a wide range of secondhand sources. Letscher told me he “aggressively collects paper” including, books, magazines, album covers, typography, promotional materials, advertising and newspapers that he uses to construct his work.

Thumbing through a few of Letscher’s catalogs, I was impressed by the variety of his collage technique. There are several distinct phases to his work from the circular patterns, to abstract landscapes, to kind of narrative diagram looking pieces, layering of patterns to create screens and the current work that seems to be more about rectangular repetition.

Letscher said most work generally falls in one of three categories – decorative, expressionist and conceptual. I would consider these collages to be decorative, though I would avoid the pejorative connotations that often accompany referring to a work of art as decorative. I see a few artists trying to make work similar to Letscher’s often using digital media to create collages. I am kind of against the digitally based Photoshop collage prints. They look and feel cheap. But Letscher’s work is neither. It appears to be the product of a painstaking process.

Along with Letscher, the gallery will show work by Lisa Kokin, who uses paper pulp from pulp novels to create sculptures. She also chops up the covers and stitches them into flowers that spread across the wall. The work obviously references the text and interaction of printed words in a visual arts context. Both colorful and pleasing to the eyes, Letscher’s and Kokin’s works go together like peanut butter and jelly.

The opening reception for Lance Letscher is 5 to 8 p.m., Friday, at Tayloe Piggott Gallery. Free. 733-0555.

Pasatiempo, The Santa Fe New Mexican
By Rob DeWalt
April 2-8, 2010

In late fall 2009, while assembling catalog images for an exhibit in Texas and another opening this weekend at Eight Modern in Santa Fe, Austin-based collage artist Lance Letscher began to recognize a continuity and an underlying narrative in some of his newer work. From image to image, a story took shape, and Letscher began to explore uncharted territory: the creation of a self-penned children’s book featuring his art. The result, titled The Perfect Machine(University of Texas Press, 2010), is the focus of Letscher’s exhibit in Santa Fe, which is on view through May 15.

“As soon as I thought I might want to write a story,” Letscher told Pasatiempo, “the skeleton of it was immediately obvious. I worked on fleshing it out for a few days, and then realized that there were gaps in the story that required illustrations. And I also realized that if I made some of the pieces I had already been thinking of,it would add body and breadth to the book’s written narrative.” The Perfect Machine tells the tale of a curious boy, a doodler and a tinkerer, who imagines what the perfect machine might look like. A whimsical journey through the creation of contraptions like rockets,tractors, a city on wheels, a gizmo that reads books, and even handguns leads the boy to wonder if the perfect machine might actually be himself.

Serving as a playful showcase for Letscher’s newest body of collage work, The Perfect Machine didn’t come easy for the artist. “It was almost like there was a feedback loop operating between my usual creative process and the writing of the story,” he said.”One pushed the other along and vice-versa in a somewhat new direction;and that created a lot of anxiety for me.” Letscher explained that within the meticulous arrangement of patterns evident in many of his other pieces there was a “safe remove” with regard to his personality and inner life. “In previous collage works I could fabricate things and create characters, and I didn’t really have to talk about myself in such a direct mode of expression if I didn’t really want to,” he said. “I felt like I was giving a lot of myself up in the Perfect Machine story, and I was revealing things about myself that I thought would come under scrutiny.” Letscher had an image in his mind of the people who regularly viewed and collected his collages, and he felt that he was”going off in a direction where those people might assume I’d lost my mind a little bit.”

In an introduction to the 2009 monograph titled Lance Letscher: Collage(University of Texas Press), art critic and journalist Charles Dee Mitchell describes some of Letscher’s earlier work — sculpture and woodwork, mostly –as dark and linked to emotional trauma in the artist’s childhood. And while guarded about most experiences from his younger years, Letscher admits that dark themes are woven into some of the pieces he created while working as a night tech in a wood shop during his graduate studies at the University of Texas(he holds a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the university, with a printmaking background). “Yeah, I was pretty melodramatic in my 20s,” he joked. “But I also had access to tons of high-end tools and a good sense of practicality. I made things with the tools while I had the chance.” Letscher then discovered naturalism and hand carving and switched from wood to marble as his three-dimensional medium.”I loved marble because of how luminous and ethereal it was,” he said. “I was sort of in a depressed frame of mind back then. Carving marble indoctrinated me into the funerary qualities of the material itself, and I suppose that also helped drive the darker context of some of my sculptural work.”

That work eventually required larger slabs of marble which, lacking a studio at the time, Letscher carved in his backyard in Austin. “But the work started taking longer and I wasn’t getting anything finished,” he said. “I started having a crisis about my career’s direction.” To get beyond that mind-set, Letscher literally went back to the drawing board. “I began making little sketches in the living room on a TV tray in the company of my kids.I could draw at night and cut things out and make six collages in one sitting.I felt like I was being productive and working on solid ideas again.”Cutting out drawings and pictures and superimposing them onto a board or paper,Letscher produced layered, densely packed spaces for the creative impulses that he couldn’t relate through marble. When that took hold, he said, “I just started running with it.”

In the early-to-mid ’90s, Letscher began working (and would work for many years) in the Austin studio of Amado Peña. Before the studio closed, Letscher produced color etchings and other work at the Southwest artist’s Texas home base. “I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Peña,” Letscher said.”Many ideas regarding my color vocabulary and advice about the tricky business side of the art world can be attributed to him.”

When space became available for Letscher at Peña’s studio, he began creating larger collage pieces. As Letscher’s works increased in size and frequency, so,too, did his need for raw materials. Meticulously manipulated found objects in the form of handwritten and printed materials and faded vinyl record sleeves sporting an array of fonts, pictures, and colors inform a majority of Letscher’s work. In the bookstore dumpsters of Austin, during the then-presumed death rattle of vinyl records and amid an ever-waning respect for the printed word, he struck gold. He continues to mine refuse receptacles, among other sources, for castaway books, letters, LP covers, and other ephemera,sorting them into boxes based not necessarily on size, shape, or color, but by dates, memories, and the characters or narratives he imagines.

A commission to create a large-scale collage for Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas in Austin played a role in Letscher’s embrace of a more childlike approach. “In the process of conceptualizing that piece, I began to think of my work in terms of a more juvenile audience. I wanted to make the collage appeal to kids, obviously, and I wanted to put a lot of imagery in it that would draw on their imagination and catch their attention.”

Letscher’s current collages may speak to a more playful side in a gallery setting, but his methodology still includes hours of rote cutting and shaping.With few exceptions, which include the inside wrap of his Collage monograph, he doesn’t rely on templates or hand-drawn patterns to push the work toward quick completion. “That tends to strip the organic quality of the work away,” he said. “I want to have things stay improvisational, and I don’t want to control too much of what I’m doing on the proverbial canvas, because there’s more truth in the work without all of that. When you’re kind of desperate and feel like you’re failing, you do things you wouldn’t normally do. You take risks as an artist, and that’s ultimately your job. A lot of the things I do in the studio, I do to intentionally thwart my natural inclination to want to be mentally and psychologically at ease. It’s a conscious decision to be unnerved but all-willing the moment I approach the blank surface.”

Letscher said that he takes all of the strict instructions and self-imposed rules that an art education can sometimes foster and applies them in such a way that they can’t obstruct the final stages of his creative process. “If you haven’t guessed by now,” he explained, “I spend a lot of time in the studio alone, cutting pieces of paper and other materials. It’s during those hours that my mind wanders, and I develop stories and create characters or narratives.” Take, for instance, the handguns in The Perfect Machine. “The presence of the guns,” he said,”is the most complete autobiographical aspect of the children’s book, and it’s so innocent; but at the same time it delicately hints at the dangers such a contraption can imply. My uncle had an Astra-model handgun used by the German Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe during the last leg of the Spanish Civil War. They were crude weapons that looked kind of like a ray gun. My uncle would take my cousins and I out shooting when I was about 10 years old, and thus, that gun has acquired a mythical place in my memory. I was lucky enough to find one, and it found its place in the book.”

Like a boy painstakingly arranging toy soldiers before engaging in a battle whose outcome is unknown and perhaps unimportant to anyone else, Letscher compartmentalizes the repetitive aspects of his collage work early on, leaving the rest of his time for the serious work of playing with memories, some dark and some imagined, others real and bathed in bright colors. But all of them are approached with a sensitivity and sense of purpose that many people — artists or not — often leave behind in childhood.

Details:
Lance Letscher: The Perfect Machine
Opening reception with the artist 5:30-7:30 p.m. Friday, April 2; exhibit through May 15
Eight Modern, 231 Delgado

When I met Lance Letscher in his tidy studio in North Austin, I felt a flicker of recognition though it was the first time we’d met.  Letscher’s made a name for himself with his detailed, colorful collages that create imaginary worlds out of relics of the past, including houses and cars cut out of vintage model train catalogs. He’s also the artist and author of a children’s book, The Perfect Machine, and that’s where we’d first been introduced. Letscher’s quiet intensity has seeped into the book; you could call it a conceptual autobiography.

The Perfect Machine takes place inside the mind of a young, intensely introspective boy as he discovers the creative process. The illustrations are collages, often abstract, which reflect what’s going on inside the boy’s mind. He likes to hole up in his child’s workshop, a hut “made up of things that other people throw away,” and contemplate what might be “the perfect machine.”

He considers motorcycles, guns, rockets, and tractors, then dismisses them one by one. A city on wheels? Pretty cool … but not perfect. He considers nature. A tree, he realizes, is a “very incredible machine!” As the boy’s thoughts evolve, the collages that accompany the text go from jumbled lines and random images and letters to tidy, color-coded boxes. After a dream full of vibrant images and words on the page, he has his eureka moment. He wonders what kind of machine can “write a book or paint a picture? Can’t I do all of these things?”

The book has a heaviness to it and is more a story of contemplation than liberation. There’s no mistaking it as a child of its creator. The boy from The Perfect Machine has grown up, but his essence is recognizable. Letscher is serious and introspective, clearly the type who would rather be in his “hut,” immersed in his art and ideas, than be interviewed.

Letscher admits he prefers to let his work speak for itself. Even publishing The Perfect Machine made him uneasy. It was the first time he had written a narrative to go along with his artwork. “I got very self-conscious about it,” Letscher says. “One of my tactics has been to create art that has very little to do with me, so I don’t have to worry about people thinking I’m crazy or soft. I don’t have to worry about my faults coming through my work. But this story is very revealing, in a personal way, and that created a lot of anxiety.”

Like the boy in The Perfect Machine, Letscher has been making things for as long as he can remember and always knew he would be an artist. “I never had a backup plan,” he says. He remembers being mesmerized by the art in children’s books, like the vibrant line drawings in Ferdinand the Bull. He moved on to fine art, everything from Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele (jailed at the turn of the 19th century for displaying erotic art in a space accessible to children) to the conceptual drawings of M.C. Escher. He started to draw and copy things, especially from the Whole Earth Catalog. Letscher’s attraction to the catalog’s sprawling, diagram-heavy pages has re-emerged in his collages, which are full of vintage images of everything from miniature planes to intricate gearboxes. “I discovered the Whole Earth Catalog before puberty and learned about everything from mechanics to sex there,” he says.

After graduating with an MFA from UT-Austin in 1989, Letscher began to create intricately carved woodwork and furniture. Soon he was working with marble, which is very time-consuming and difficult. “I was stronger and more ambitious then,” he says. “I wanted to take on the heavy hitters. It was all wrapped up in my ego.”

Letscher would work an entire year on one marble statue, painstakingly carving huge pieces of stone that weighed hundreds of pounds; the finished piece might measure a cubic foot. Sometimes a piece would not work out, and he would have to start over. Because of the slow nature of the work, it proved hard to find galleries to display it. “It was a real crisis period,” he remembers. “It was tough to realize I was going in the wrong direction.” Letscher has saved only one marble work from that period, a heavy carved rendition of a human skull that sits on his desk.

After several years of frustration, he decided to try something radically different in 1995. He began drawing quick sketches—simple, monochromatic pieces inspired by nature—then cutting them out and pasting them on top of each other to give the drawings a sense of space. “I wasn’t really approaching it at as collage at first,” he says. “I wanted to find a way to work without thinking about what I was creating. I needed to find a new way of thinking. It evolved very gradually.”

I ask Letscher if it was liberating to stop struggling with marble and embrace collage. He grimaces at my word choice. “I’ve never had a sense of liberation or bliss about my work,” he says. “I’m very anxiety-driven. I’ve been varying degrees of miserable my entire life.”

But collage did allow Letscher to make a living. His work is popular among collectors, and he can produce enough of it to stock galleries. He has had six shows this year—not that success makes the work any easier. “When I think about it, I’m finally doing everything I wanted to do,” he says. “But when I’m sitting here cutting, it’s still the technical issues I’m dealing with. Trying to solve a particular problem. And trying to continue to be creative and create things that are powerful—and not inhibit it. The obstacles I have to overcome are my own obstacles.”

Letscher’s work often tells a story. One collage shows a human-like figure whose head seems to explode with ideas. It’s the kind of art that has obvious appeal to children as well as adults. So it was a natural fit when, a few years ago, he was commissioned to do a large collage outside a surgery room at the Dell Children’s Hospital in Austin. In that work, he played up what he calls the “Where’s Waldo effect” of his work by including words and pictures from children’s books.

Letscher has a certain childlike attraction to cool planes, trains and bikes, which all find their way into The Perfect Machine. For instance, he long wanted to buy a rare, vintage racing motorcycle that’s too light and small to legally ride on the streets. “I’d show it to my wife and she’d say, ‘What are you going to do with it?’” he says. “So eventually I came up with a strategy to make an art project out of it. So I got to buy it.”

That motorcycle, covered with a collage of brightly colored boxes, fills a spread of The Perfect Machine along with other cool, boyish stuff such as a yellow-and-blue, plaid-plastered berretta. (This being a children’s book, the boy decides guns are not a perfect machine because “people often hurt animals and other people with them.”) Letscher hopes that the book appeals to kids much like him, the ones struggling to channel powerful imaginations. “I don’t have an evangelical sense about art,” he says. “I don’t think it will change the world. But for certain kids, it could be important in their life. It could make them interested in making things. I believe in that.”

New York Observer
By Mario Naves
Published April 17, 2002

As if to prove that the most exciting contemporary art is made by the least usual of suspects, here comes Lance Letscher from Austin, Tex. Mr. Letscher, who is having his first solo New York exhibition at the Howard Scott Gallery, is unusual not just in terms of his geography, but also in his aesthetic. Uninterested in fashion, resistant to pomp and constitutionally incapable of the rote of superficial, he’s something we don’t encounter too often: an artist of substance, grit and purpose.

Mr. Letscher makes abstract collages from found objects, yet is particular enough about the objects he finds that that classification is all but beside the point. Favoring materials that have the patina of history and handling, Mr. Letscher shapes his art with old ledgers, discarded diaries, antiquarian books and recipes for Grandma’s Old Fashioned Molasses Nut Squares. While enamored of these items, the artist exhibits no compunction in slicing and dicing them for the greater good—that good being an art permeated with memory, encompassing in outlook and indebted to the land. His pieces bring to mind the notations of an amateur astronomer or the shimmer of the setting sun.

Mr. Letscher stops us in our tracks: once there, we don’t want to leave. As an artist, he’s as nuanced as Anne Ryan, as delicate as Joseph Cornell and as pure—in his own impure way—as Sol Lewitt. But the artist Mr. Letscher resembles most is William Blake: he, too, strives for unquenchable metaphysical sustenance. In the end, however, I prefer Mr. Letscher. His pictures are a lot more pliable than Blake’s—a lot less loony, too. In fact, the sober tone of Mr. Letscher’s reveries may be an indicator of the lonely fate a visionary suffers in an age as tech-happy as our own. Then again, it could just mean that he’s a laconic type from Texas. Whatever the case, this is one stunning debut.

Lance Letscher: Someone’s Life/Collages and Drawings is at Howard Scott Gallery, 529 West 20^thStreet, seventh floor, until April 27.

An array of colorful paper strips cheerfully swathes the rustic, mechanical frame of a 9mm gun. Only the tip and trigger of the weapon remains uncovered to remind viewers that although the object is given a lighthearted aesthetic, it is not a toy.

From this gun to a neon-green bike decorated with geometric paper cutouts to a paper collage of a boy slumped in a chair, Austin artist Lance Letscher playfully presents the juxtaposition of human emotion and machine in his new exhibition, “The Perfect Machine.”

The exhibit features collages of objects in conjunction with the publication of the artist’s first children’s book of the same name. The book is set to release in September, and the exhibit is ongoing at D Berman Gallery until May 15.

Letscher said part of the reason he wanted to write “The Perfect Machine” was because he felt children today are required to use their imagination less.

“They watch TV, and they really don’t have to imagine anything,” he said. “All the pictures are already there. Imagination is just no longer engaged the same way as before.”

The notion of putting imagination into play resonates throughout “The Perfect Machine” –a story about a boy’s journey to create what he thinks is the perfect machine.

The outline of the story only took a couple of days to draft, Letscher said. But the production became a never-ending spiral of creativity where artwork would point to more stories, and more stories would lead to more creation.

And though “The Perfect Machine” is finished, Letscher does not halt his artistic drive. Instead, he streams his ideas onto his next project.

“I keep going on with it, and I try not to evaluate or be too conscious in steering myself,” he said.

Letscher, soft-spoken and shy, remains humble when talking about the growing popularity of his collage work and the six personal shows he has this year, including one in Barcelona, Spain, and another in Madrid.

Letscher’s first fond memories of art were wandering around the old art building’s halls while his mother was taking art classes at UT.

“My mother was the one [who] encouraged me, got be started, showed me art books, told me about people and told me how to do things,” Letscher said.

It wasn’t long before he found himself on old, familiar grounds. Letscher graduated from UT with a bachelor’s in fine arts and then beat out 70 applicants to be the only graduate student in the painting department of his class.

Though he has a painting background, Letscher’s first works were realistic woodcarvings. He said the way he used to draw was to look at something and draw it accurately instead of by memory or using his imagination.  He translated this skill into a traditional woodcarving technique.

Shortly thereafter, though, Letscher found himself at a dead end.

His carvings were taking too much time, the materials were too expensive and his large sculptures were difficult to move—all of which made it hard from him to get into art shows.

Letscher soon started to make simple drawings at night and then cut the drawings up and glue them back together to achieve a sense of depth.

Since those nights, he has continually been making paper collages ranging from 3 inches by 5 inches to 9 feet by 14 feet, using X-acto knives and rulers to make precise cuts and wallpaper glue to intricately paste his papers together.

“I go through a lot of paper,” he said. “There was a time in my life when I would go salvage things, get things out of the dumpster, try to find things, but now I have to streamline.”

Letscher said because he is booking more shows, he doesn’t have time to go out and find papers.

Over the years, though, Letscher has accumulated 100 cubic feet of paper, which amounts to the size of a Toyota Prius. Some of the papers are from his days of rummaging through Half Price Books’ dumpsters, others are bought and some are given to him by family and friends.

Though he has collected a mass amount of supplies, he said he does not keep the papers organized and frequently rummages through a pile for inspiration.

“I have to go look for things because then, I see things I didn’t think of,” he said. “I see things that make me think of other things. The process of constantly going through my inventory keeps it fresher. Things don’t get stuck.”

Letscher said creating is the most important thing to him. He said even though he does have a lot of shows and has to make a lot of pieces, he doesn’t want to just produce work. He wants to create it.

“I’ve learned this very strong distinction between producing artwork and creating artwork,” he said.

“When something is designed as a utilitarian object, decisions are made in its construction that give it a voice – what fabrics are available – and I am trying to invest the work with a structure that has an underlying logic of craft that is expressive of something else: a personal and intimate experience in making it,” says Austin-based Lance Letscher (as found here at D Berman gallery).

My friend Donald insisted I check out Letscher’s book, which he thought I’d love, and I do. I appreciate how Letscher’s work inevitably enfolds history through his use of materials/remnants, and his patterns may be massive and vibrant, but are built from modesty, time, and gradation as well. For me the most inspiring thing about this work is the topography and sense of space Letscher creates with nothing but bits of meticulously-applied paper that are allowed to remain just that. Also, some of his work is mural-sized (but still composed of the same small pieces).

It was interesting to find (in this Fiberarts article) that Letscher originally worked with wood and stone before arriving at collage. His first collages were made by the layering on cardboard of small realistic tree branches he had drawn and then cut out. It’s like his 3d proficiency imploded into a page!

Lance Letscher has said that making art was “a foundational element of my personality.” His mother was a graduate of the art school at the University of Texas at Austin, where Letscher grew up being given art supplies for Christmas and birthdays. At UT, Letscher found the medium of printmaking to be a natural extension for his drawing skills, and through it he developed his understanding of color — particularly — he has said in previous interviews, “color harmonies, mixing and balance.”

Letscher was trained as a printmaker at the University of Texas art school, where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and attracted notice in the 1980s Dallas art scene for his small sculptures, before transitioning to drawing, print-making and eventually collage. He is also the author and illustrator of the children’s book “The Perfect Machine.”

After graduation, Letscher worked for Amado Peña, the New Mexico artist known for his Southwestern-style prints. This essentially created an apprenticeship for Letscher, which he has called an invaluable learning experience in both applying color and watching a commercially successful artist at work in the world.

“There is a definite art to marketing your work and presenting yourself in a professional way,” Letscher said in a 2004 interview. “A lot of artists have a romantic or Bohemian attitude to their work. It may work in the studio, but it doesn’t work when approaching galleries.” Letscher is represented by a dozen galleries around the world, and a show of his work opens at Eight Modern on Delgado Street today.

The show, called “Twenty-Five Books and an Ear,” is “primarily comprised of collaged books that are meant to function independently as well as, hopefully, gain some energy and momentum as a group,” Letscher said of his second solo show at Eight Modern. As for the show title, it “is intended to open several possible avenues of interpretation, one being an oblique reference to the Van Gogh ear mythology: the ear as a symbol of the ultimate artistic effort or offering. Also, it alludes to the idea of an audience for the contents of the books.”

The “Ear” of the title takes concrete form in “The First Man,” a carving of a life-size human ear emerging from a block of marble. The sculpture was made by the artist almost 20 years ago, before he had begun working in collage, when he was known primarily as a talented sculptor of marble and wood.

About 18 years ago, Letscher began working in his current medium, collage. Collage – constructed assemblages from found materials – is often found on the edges of art. Visually and conceptually, collages challenge the viewer to consider a world made of parts that total more than their sums. Many critics think this is especially true of Letscher’s work. His creations made with bits of old books, handwritten letters, ledgers and other manuscripts have received international acclaim.

His sculptures were heavy and, paradoxically, fragile and he had a hard time getting them into galleries. While working three jobs, Letscher started making “simple, small drawings to work through ideas – cutting them out and superimposing one upon another to get more density and depth. That’s how the collages started,” he has said.

A lifelong Austin resident, Letscher has built a regional, national and international following, exhibiting throughout the United States, as well as in Paris, Berlin, Munich, Barcelona, London and Poland. In 2004, a mid-career retrospective of the artist’s work titled “Books and Parts of Books: 1996-2004″traveled to four museums. In 2009, the University of Texas Press published a full-length monograph on his work.

For nearly 20 years he has worked nearly exclusively with harvested papers such as old books, records and other found materials. After careful selection, Letscher painstakingly slices them into strips and shapes, assembling thousands of them into stunning collages. In “Twenty-five Books and an Ear,” Letscher invokes his medium’s origins.

“The books, jacketed with relics of other volumes, both embody and honor a history of the written word,” gallery owner Margo Thoma said. “Fragments of text and images ignite the imagination and offer countless associations without insisting upon any of them.”

“Recognizable elements of books – their spines, endpapers, marginalia, illustrations and pages of text meticulously shredded and recombined – are visible in many of these works, giving them the appearance of tessellated anthologies,” wrote Albert Mobilio about Letscher’s work in Bookforum. “A lifetime of literacy – from first scribble to adulthood, from the smell of kindergarten Crayolas to the purposeful study of workaday instructions – is filleted and condensed to produce a melancholic narrative, one that registers just how deeply our personal history is enmeshed with books, pens, and paper.”

Despite his meticulousness and discipline in the studio, Letscher strives to let his creative choices be as unconscious as possible, guided by “an unseen hand.”

Letscher told Bleach magazine that he tries to “stay out of the way (of the work) as much as possible.” The artist cultivates a near-ascetic working method that eschews potential distractions, explaining, “I stopped listening to the radio while I worked (I work alone) to promote a more profound sense of boredom which I hoped would improve the work. The work did get better, but it has made me into a very dull person, especially socially.”

Writing in the Austin Chronicle in 2004, Madeline Irvine claimed that Letscher’s very reticence and reclusiveness have created a “mystique” around his work and that his extraordinary focus is a key to the quality of his pieces. “Letscher has worked on his art assiduously, even while holding down other jobs and raising a family,” she wrote. “Those years may have limited the amount of work he was able to send out into the world, but that added to the mystique. These days, Letscher’s shows are a sea of red dots — the art world’s discreet ‘sold’ sign.” He has been able to make a living with his art for more than 10 years now.

By Spike Gillespie
PublishedApril 20, 2010

One again, D Berman Gallery unleashes yet another fabulous installation. This time around, visitors can take in—and, if the price is right, take home—one of the fantastic Letscher collages currently on display.

Sure, I enjoy a good black and white photo exhibit from time to time, but color pulls me in even more. In “The Perfect Machine,” Letscher serves up his vision just the way I prefer it: bright, busy and, in some instances, three-dimensional—pieced together from whatever found prints the Austin artist happened upon during his creative jaunts around town.

If bold and beautiful sounds like your bag too then don’t miss this exuberant collection…

Book’em! Score an Advanced Copy

In addition to pieces on display, D Berman is selling copes of Letscher’s new book, also titled The Perfect Machine.

Technically, Letscher aimed this book at kids, but don’t let that fool you. Adults will dig the whimsy collected within (and in fact, maybe we need it even more than the little people).

Diehard Letscher fans should also appreciate the opportunity to score an advanced copy—The Perfect Machinedoesn’t officially hit shelves until September.

April 1 – Mat 15, 2010

The protagonist of Lance Letscher’s recent children’s book asks himself a question: “What is the perfect machine?” It is a question that pervades Letscher’s recent exhibition at D. Berman Gallery, a collection of collage works that also serve to illustrate the book that shares the exhibition’s title The Perfect Machine. Frenetic abstract assemblages in children’s block colors cover the walls of the galleries. Peeking through and behind these more formal geometric abstractions are images of shifts and gears, cut-out ransom note letters, and sections of children’s books from the 1950s and 60s. The works create a tension between the handmade and the machine-driven––the human impulse to create and the mechanical directive to produce.

Letscher is known for taking mundane everyday objects and creating an arrangement of abstract formal beauty. The works exhibit a ruddy geometry as the materials he chooses are often worn down old record covers, the boards of rummage sale books or used magazines. These found items, arranged so meticulously and obsessively by Letscher, recall the best of outsider art. Yet there is no dark underbelly of madness to this work—it is as light and airy as a child’s tale (even a collaged gun looks innocent and banal in this exhibition). The images of gears and shifts that radiate out of the pieced together cardboard squares aren’t referencing the mechanization of society a la Hannah Höch, but rather merely exist as the very things that they are—the inside stuff that makes a machine run.

The works in the exhibition, some larger and looser with scribbles and roughed up empty space, some smaller and denser with a flurry of letters, images and color, stand perfectly well on their own. However, combined with the narrative of the young boy “whose head was filled with ideas” and who wonders “Could a tree be a machine?” the works elucidate a deeper connection between the mechanical and human. Throughout the tale, the boy examines different types of machines: a walking machine, a city with wheels, a gun, a windmill. In the end, the boy wakes from a dream and asks, “What can write a book or paint a picture? Can’t I do all these things?”

It’s a sweet tale of self-discovery, the realization that machines, like picture books and collaged images, are also human made. The perfect machine is revealed to be the imperfect human. Is this message too sweet? Are the works depleted of a richer, more complex reading due to their association to a child’s book? Perhaps. I certainly would like to see what happens when the machine/human goes awry. Does the gun ever go off accidentally? What happens when the train goes off the rails? The works, at times, can feel sterile; frenetic without any real movement. A more pressing question might not be “What is the perfect machine?” but instead, “Can the perfect machine make compelling art?”

Katie Geha is pursuing her Ph.D. in art history at The University of Texas at Austin.

HuffPost Arts’ Haiku Reviews is a monthly feature where invited critics review exhibitions and performances in short form. Some will be in the traditional Haiku form of 5x7x5 syllables, others might be a sonnet and others might be more free-form. This month, George Heymont, Laurence Vittes and Peter Frank give their quick takes on performing and visual arts.

Lance Letscher must be one of America’s most truly dedicated, even obsessive collagists, and that’s saying a lot. He covers his available surfaces – which in this case include an array of books – with thick webs of paper bits, every one of them carefully cut or even carved out of its original source and fit together amidst all the others as if inlaid. This isn’t jigsaw-puzzling, this is jeweling. The Austin-based artist clearly loves making collages, using the technique in some cases to satisfy a list-making impulse by collecting myriad images of the same object, but more often to assuage his horror vacui with superbly interlaced tangles of letters, textures, pictures of things, borrowings from old magazines, color swatches, and all manner of stuff. Stuff indeed – Letscher’s approach to collage, manic as it is, conveys a palpable element of relief, as it infers the recycling of every scrap of paper that’s collected in your attic, library, or woodshed. It’s the everything-is-useful aesthetic brought to delightful refinement and powered more by wit, curiosity, and, yes, poetry than by crafty self-indulgence. Letscher’s formal method is close to that of Kurt Schwitters, but his sensibility descends from Joseph Cornell. (8 Modern, 231 Delgado St., Santa Fe; thru June 30. www.eightmodern.net)

– Peter Frank

TAI Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Lance Letscher: Secret File.

With Secret File, Letscher’s complex collages turn into coded messages and patterns. In the titular piece a mysterious figure carries a folder overflowing with mysterious papers and tinkertoy constructions. Secret File and its spilling secrets and inventions are, in Letscher’s words “parallel to the idea of creativity and how the work is produced.” Letscher lets his work evolves on its own, striving “stay out of the way (of the work) as much as possible.”

Letscher lives, works, and collects the various found objects that make up his playful collages in his hometown of Austin, Texas. Always on the lookout for unique materials, he stockpiles old book covers, newspaper clippings, vintage LP covers, recipes, and antique letters. The use of semi-recognizable items and materials gives Letscher’s work an unplaceable sense of nostalgia and familiarity, an almost “on the tip of my tongue” impression. “If while exploring them we find landmarks with intense personal meaning, we know that they are there in the service of Letscher’s vision for this particular work, and that our personal response to a specific element is only one component of the overall experience,” writes Charles Dee Mitchell in the 2007 catalogue Lance Letscher: Collage. His collages are comprised of fascinating patterns and textures; Letscher truly has an eye for harmony of color and the familiarity of his material adds to his work’s broad appeal.

Letscher was trained as a printmaker at the University of Texas art school, where he received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. In the 1980s, he began to attract notice in the Dallas art scene for his small sculptures, before transitioning to drawing, print-making and eventually collage. He is also the author and illustrator of the children’s book The Perfect Machine. He has been exhibited throughout the United States. Letscher’s work is expanding and gaining traction internationally, and has been shown in Paris, Berlin, Munich, Barcelona, London and Poland. In 2004, a mid-career retrospective of the artist’s work entitled Books and Parts of Books: 1996-2004traveled to four museums. In 2009, the University of Texas Press published a full-length monograph on his work. The subject of an upcoming documentary, by Oscar nominated editor and filmmaker Sandra Adair, Letscher’s process will continue to be chronicled throughout the year.

Over the years, Lance Letscher’s work has become richer and more mysterious. “Industry and Design,” the current exhibition of his work at D Berman Gallery, signals new shifts in the collages for which he has gained national notoriety. Some are much thicker and meatier, adding a sculptural depth to the work. And Letscher, a self-described colorist, takes color to a whole new level here: deep and rich and thoroughly satisfying. Combining the illusions of depth created by the color-play with the real spatial depth of the bas-relief brings new layers to art that is created out of reused, printed, drawn, or bound papers that are old enough to be called historical. In addition to Letscher’s abstractions, we see new imagery depicted in simple, blocky forms, mixed with fragments of children’s artwork. Even at its most enigmatic, Letscher’s work engages the mind and eye. Here, Letscher answers questions about new paths in his work.

Austin Chronicle: Why the exhibition title “Industry and Design”?

Lance Letscher: That is a reference to my studio practice and mindset right now: industry in the sense that work is being industrious and design in the sense of formally making design decisions. One of the stronger themes throughout the work is construction … making buildings, and industry in the sense of manufacturing – there are factories and references to robots. There is a thread that goes through the show that is about mechanization and industry.

AC: Yet when we imagine state-of-the-art factories and robots today, they are so different from what you picture. Your imagery is drawn from a different era.

LL: It is more of a storybook perspective.

AC: Tell me about that perspective. The imagery recalls childhood: fragments of children’s drawings and coloring books and toy boxes from the first half of the 20th century.

LL: I kind of drifted into that mode. One thing that influenced that is the commission I did for the children’s hospital [Dell Children’s Medical Center]. I started thinking about kids as my audience. It started to influence the vocabulary I was using.

AC: There are other shifts in the work. For one, you have much more recognizable imagery: blocky house forms …

LL: The images are not representational; they are just cues. If I made a picture of a house with a tree in the front yard and I meant to picture that, then it would be representational. In this case, they function more as associative cues, and they are meant to be read in context with everything else in the picture plane, the marks and scribbles and little words. And that’s my strategy: to create an abstract or emotional or psychological space. The bottom line about my work, and this work in particular, is that it is a form of expressionism. What I am really after is the momentum, the emotional mo-mentum that is built up as you move from one image to the next, not just in one piece but as you move from one piece to another in the show.

AC: I was surprised to find serious themes in the language of childhood, for example, Train and Tunnel, recalling the Holocaust.

LL: The Holocaust has been a focus of my reading since my early 20s. In this show, the relationship to the Holocaust was about mechanization and turning the genocide into an industry. I tried to make them as light as I could, to make it a storybook image or a dream image by using bright colors and drawings made from Crayolas.

AC: Why did you do that?

LL: If a kindergartner were told about it by his parents, what kind of images would you generate? You wouldn’t generate black-and-white, grainy photographs. One thing that I have been thinking about a lot is how children process suffering and images about suffering. I think it is an odd mix of accurate clarity, very in-the-moment experience, and a distancing, a detachment, something that is more akin to fantasy, telling themselves stories about it.