ALL: Master Collection List
Nationality
American
Preview
Date of Work
2017
Medium
Oil on canvas
Signature
Bottom right
Height
30"
Width
40"
Depth
1"
Collection/Provenance
Division of Research & Economic Development Collection
Status
On Display: Hallway next to reception
Location
Division of Research & Economic Development
Artist Bio
Robert LeMar is an American painter whose work ranges from realism and portraiture to expressive abstraction and still life. LeMar studied at the Maryland School of Art and Design, where he was influenced by artists including Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. LeMar spent a decade sketching portraits along the Ocean City, Maryland boardwalk, refining the technical skill that continues to inform his painting practice. His work has been exhibited throughout Maryland and is held in numerous private and corporate collections.
Additional Information
Prairie Surrealism: Familiar to North Dakotans and frequenters of rural areas, access roads connect rural communities to fields, farms, and places beyond the main highway. In LeMar's Access Road, this everyday feature of rural life becomes an entry into a landscape transformed by translucent color and geometry. A dark band of trees anchor the scene, while overlapping rectangles of surreal colors stretch across earth and sky in an unexpected way, suggesting that even well-traveled and familiar places hold possibilities have yet to perceive. Within an academic art collection, in a building devoted to funding research, Access Road also offers a metaphor for accessing knowledge. Research often begins with something familiar and follows it toward what is not yet understood. LeMar's layered landscape invites a similar movement: looking through and across established structures to discover new relationships. At UND, research support creates pathways for curiosity to become discovery. By making rural infrastructure both familiar and surreal, the artist suggests that access is the condition that turns familiar landscape into a field of possibility. Description: A colorful landscape including a dark treeline across a low ridge, a band of water below it, and a broken, mottled foreground of orange, rust, and green. Over the whole surface runs a grid of translucent vertical and horizontal shapes in pink, yellow, blue, and green.
Condition
Excellent
Rights
Images are provided for educational purposes only and may not be reproduced for commercial use. Images may be protected by artist copyright. A credit line is required to be used for any public non-commercial educational purpose. The credit line must include, “Image courtesy of the University of North Dakota.”