LESLIE JAKOBOVITS
Painter of Plein-air Landscapes, Portraits & Figurative Works
Mexico Insights, January 2006
“International Artist Leslie Jakobovits Finds Paintings in Lakeside’s Beauty”
By Joan Alita Ray
As I watch Leslie Jakobovits work on his large impressionistic painting of brightly colored flowers he uses a brush that is extended with along piece of wood. When he notes my interest and surprise, he tells me how Matisse used the same method to work on larger canvases and I vaguely remember a picture in my college art class that almost mirrors what I now see. All he lacks, we laugh, is the wonderful white smock, maybe with a little black tie at the neck.
To be around Leslie as he talks about his passion for art and what inspires him is to have a fascinating short course in art history. He quotes Gauguin, VanGogh and Matisse as easily as talking about the way the mountains are reflected off Lake Chapala or how the wind moves the water and changes the scene with each soft breeze. By sharing how he sees the vistas and beauty of Mexico, he helps me see our home village of Ajijic with new eyes, and also to think about our beautiful little paradise with “new” eyes.
As Leslie showed me some of his vibrant art in the Ajijic studio he’s just finished at his home, he told me about how music plays a part in paintings. “Gauguin talked about attempting to capture different harmonies in his paintings,” he tells me. “I also believe there is a quiet music behind everything we see. I try to capture that music in my colors and paint strokes. Everything has its own harmonies and rhythms - when you stop to see and feel them.”
“When I paint,” he continues, “I attempt to interpret my subject matter through color, tone and the juxtaposition of shapes into the visual equivalent of music. I become a conductor of color, an architect of form and if successful, the creator of a work that grows and has a spirit of its own.”
Rio Bravo 40 x 30
Leslie is a world traveler and has shown his work in fine art galleries internationally, but here in Mexico he is finding a different, maternal muse, and as I listen to him explain it, I feel some pride in this special, local charm.
There’s a feeling I get from the landscape here that I don’t get from other places. It’s very soft here, motherly. Our mountains are older and smoother. There’s a different poetry here, a different rhythm that really appeals to me. I think it’s very maternal here, more welcoming, and I think of New Mexico, where we lived before coming here, as more paternal with more grandeur, wider vistas, open sky.” He stops to think of other places he has lived and painted, and smiles as he comments, “Lake Chapala is actually more like Sicily, instead here I paint Mt. Garcia instead of Mt. Etna.”
After showing me some of the paintings he has completed in Ajijic, my own lesson in seeing our landscape in new ways begins by looking out over Lake Chapala. Leslie takes me out to a curving street in Rancho del Oro, and shows me how lucky we are to have such natural framing for each view. It’s certainly something I had not given proper attention to before.
“Mexico is a wonderful place for framing, in that wherever you go - around a corner, looking out over the lake, or looking down a street you see pictures in natural frames. The frame can be the trees, branches, arches from a terrace, flowers, or something else that forms a perfect picture. Do you ever notice that?” he asks as he points out the mango-hued edge of a home on one side, with trees and red bougainvillea shaping the view on the other.
Leslie then stops and sets up his canvas, completing the picture of the curving street and the lake beyond. “If you are an artist you have something to say about what you see,” he explains, “and one painting is not going to do it. Monet painted his haystack series because he was able to see them in different ways and knew that everyday the scene changes. The light is different, the shadows, the mood. Here, the light on the lake is beautiful and always changing. Sometimes it reflects the clouds and the mountains, and the wind moves the water, giving me different views.”
El Arbol Indigo (The Blue Tree) 48 x 40
“Gauguin,” he continues, “had paintings all worked out in his head before he started. I can’t work that way, and if I try, I get in the way of myself. So I need to let it evolve as I work,” he says as he paints, adding more color to what seems to me to be a completed, beautiful piece of art.
Leslie enjoys painting the landscapes and water views of the Lake Chapala area, and talked about how a good painting should continually grow. “Monet, Cezanne, and Van Gogh each painted certain kinds of landscapes. Gauguin said that there are really only two kinds of artists, plagiarists and revolutionaries. I don’t know if I agree with that, but you should be able to learn more about the painting every day and still be learning years later. I believe a work of art of real quality is similar to a friendship of real quality, it should grow with time.”
Leslie is an artist whose talent has been expressed in paintings shown in fine art galleries around the world. He fondly remembers the high school teacher who gave him the tools and the inspiration to build his life around art. Arthur Bressler was a student of German painters Max Beckmann and George Grosz. Bressler gave him, as Leslie says, “a project for the rest of my life.”
The inspiration came early when Leslie was a teenager, and the decades following found him living two years in Israel, with nine months of that time spent on a kibbutz. Then he headed for Hungary where he visited his relatives and painted new vistas, and then went on to Sweden, France, North Africa and Egypt. In France he studied an intensive year at L’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. After his European exposure and study, he earned his B.A. in art and history and then an M.F.A. from Washington State University. From there he went on to travel and study oriental painting and sculpture in India, Asia and the Far East.
While recent travels have taken Leslie and his wife, Sue Ellen, to Costa Rica and Peru, it is Ajijic they now call home. Their last home was New Mexico, where Leslie still exhibits in Fine art galleries in Santa Fe. He will show at the Giacobbe-Fritz Fine Art Gallery in Santa Fe this coming summer and at the Efren Gonzales Gallery in Ajijic in March.
Monte de Oro 36 x 32
La Plaza de Ajijic 32 x38
The new Ajijic Cultural Center will host a two-man show from January 7 through January 30. Leslie’s work will be featured, along with paintings by Antonio Cardenas. The opening for the show, which has been named A Kaleidoscope of Ajijic will be at 4pm on January 7.
Leslie wants to paint more of the local culture in the future, and talks enthusiastically about how inspired his is by the inner beauty and character he sees on the faces of Mexico’s people. But for now, the unique light in the morning and evenings calls him, along with the plazas and the churches, and the lake with its ever changing views. He finds the local landscapes too beautiful not to capture, with all that natural framing of scenes, and the maternal, soft flowing hills. As I leave, he tells me how Gauguin said of painting that it is “to dream before nature.” I hope that Leslie continues dreaming his beautiful Mexican dreams for many years to come, before another part of the world calls him away.
Copyright 2002-2006 by Mexico Insights.
Contact Leslie at: jkbvts@yahoo.com