Painter-Poet Stephanie Brody Lederman’s Raw Materials: Snippets of Overheard Conversations, Daubs of Restless Color and the Emotional Energy in the Air

NEW YORK – The American artist Stephanie Brody Lederman makes paintings on canvas and paper, and mixed-media objects that are potent cocktails of probing psychological, free-floating emotional and ambiguously poetic ingredients. Based in New York, in recent years she regularly has spent time residing and working in Paris, where she has become an enthusiastic flâneuse, meandering through that ancient city’s narrow streets, soaking up the atmosphere of neighborhoods in which dreamy surrealists once cavorted, and existentialism’s muses danced on the tables of smoke-filled, jazz-pumping boîtes de nuit.

Or something like that. The point is that, as a researcher on the lookout for inspiration of her own, over the years Brody Lederman has shown herself to be an alert, sensitive and tireless hunter-gatherer of the kinds of stuff in the atmosphere – words and phrases from overheard conversations; the silhouette of a lantern at dusk; the decorative pattern printed on a candy wrapper; the shape and sound of a walking cane – that other faces in the crowd might overlook. Along with an enthusiastic embrace of the emotionally expressive power of color, she has made such elements the raw material of her art.

Through January 9, 2010, the artist is presenting a selection of new works on canvas and on paper at O.K. Harris Works of Art in New York’s SoHo district (at 383 West Broadway).

Top, right, and immediately above: New works by the American artist Stephanie Brody Lederman. Top, right:Red Light (2009), mixed media on canvas. Above, left to right: Innocent (2009), inks on paper; Lake View(2009) a mixed-media-on-canvas diptych; and Too Big (2009), another painting made with inks on paper.Photos courtesy of the artist.