Art By Michael Lombard.

Who is Michael Lombard? Once you see his work you will never forget his legacy.

Michael’s dearest full artist and best friend Fraser MacLean, speaks about Michaels work in the most compelling and powerful connection that is expressed through his art.

What is “Art”? And who is Mike Lombard?

Personally speaking, I would say that Mike Lombard’s basic unit of pictorial currency is irreverence, but it’s a purposeful irreverence that manages to combine respect for the “sitter” with a rare ability to take the familiar and push it ever closer to the extreme.

If you look only at the paintings themselves as you walk around the gallery, you’re missing a large part of the experience that is a Mike Lombard exhibition: pay attention to the facial expressions and the, verbal - often physical - reactions of the other people in the room, and you’ll get WAY more out of the work itself - and the broad range of reactions it can provoke.

Enjoy leafing through Mike’s extraordinary sketch books, yes - but make sure you find a quiet corner to stand in afterwards, so you can enjoy watching the reactions of others as they do likewise.

Often, when we hear someone ask the question, “What is ‘Art’…?”, it’s a safe bet that what they REALLY want to know is, “What is ‘Art’ worth….?”. Some individuals to whom society attaches the word “Artist” find themselves being either argued over or neglected, while others argue internally, fretting and neglecting their own needs in pursuit of…. Of what, exactly?

To my eyes it seems clear that Mike Lombard is in pursuit of that most famous of combinations: beauty and truth. But he’s coming at the “truth” from a very different angle - and he’s absolutely determined to make sure we re-think both the definition and the purpose of “beauty”. He is, if you like, forcing us to put “ “ around everything we thought we knew, everything in the Art World that we held sacred.

My father, a talented journalist but a self-confessed “non-artist”, used to talk about “the laughter of recognition”; when we see a pictorial likeness of somebody, in the form of a portrait or a caricature, our reflex response is to laugh and say, “That is SO like….” the person who depicted.

Mike’s subjects, in this case, are not people - they’re Great Works Of Art.

BUT - because Mike takes these Great Works and treats them LIKE people, because he dares to approach them without being even momentarily deferential, he somehow manages to scare them all back to life and, in some cases, to shock an entirely new meaning or perspective into an image that, until we saw it through Mike’s eyes, seemed remote, iconic and untouchable.

Alongside the meaning of life itself, the definition of “Art” is meant to be elusive. We’re not supposed or expected - ever - to arrive at a consensus about either. But nor should we ever STOP asking both questions.

As for Mike himself - and the question “Who is Mike Lombard?”. Look around you. THAT’S who (and what) Mike is: a human Question Mark.

And that’s worth a lot.

By: Fraser Mac Lean , 21 of july / 2020

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