ARTLIFE

Featured Artist Lindsay Hutchinson

Lindsay Hutchinson

Featured Artist of the Month, April 2012

A review by John Sunderland

Exhibition Title:  ‘101 Hipsters’

Lindsay Hutchinson comes over as a quietly modest young woman from what I could tell during the hour or so we spent early this morning as she and her helper faced the monumental task of installing an exhibit of 101 paintings (or so I thought) in the hour prior to opening the café.  In fact there were, 42 or is it 43. No matter; numbers and volume do not really count in this wonderful exhibition.

In essence it appears simple. Some forty small rectangular flat-colored portraits, head and shoulders only, delineated by sinuous black expressive line.  I watched as each came out of the cardboard box and was held up to the wall for positioning. With every new piece it was like being introduced to someone new, and in a way someone you knew, as so many of the faces seemed familiar.

Lindsay’s multiple stylized figurative portraits are taken from her world of Bushwick Hipsterdom; friends and people she knows from the garden and the store, people from her building and the street. The twenty-something, thirty-something burghers of Morganville are here represented, the class of 2011/2012.

Working from observation and photographs Lindsay renders each in a similar process that looks deceptively simple, using line to delineate and provide form and expression and color, often totally unnatural as expressive decoration. Without resorting to caricature, with a sure eye and hand, she manages each time to capture a real sense of the individual.

Labels for groups of people tend to assist in the mental grouping of them all together as a genre. And here to an extent that happens, Hipsters, but only if your eyes aren’t quite open when all the kaleidoscope colors appear like a jar of jelly-beans.  Open more widely and focus and you will find succinct and character-full portrayals you feel you know —  and maybe you do.

You become captivated by the charm of each and the contact with every single person. But then grouped together as they are in blocks of twelve, you really do gain a sense of the quilted community of colorful young souls that make up a large part of the unique Bushwick community.

Deliberately mounted in irregular style, see how the subjects move about and jostle as though in a village of personalities with messages to keep or share.

It is a really wonderful show. We at Life Café hope you enjoy it. Who knows; you might see yourself up there!

Lindsey Hutchinson, originally from Indiana, is a local artist living and working in Bushwick. She says of this exhibition: “I am a Hipster. You are a Hipster. That dude over there is a Hipster.” Never was a truer word said.