LISE LEMELAND JESSUP
You haven't seen a tree until you've seen its shadow from the sky. ~Amelia Earhart
While art is always derived from life experience in some form, its not often that an artist has such a life altering experience that it changes the artwork dramatically. In my case, I had two such experiences within four years of each other. The first experience was learning to fly an airplane. My husband, who was my flight instructor, introduced me to a world I never dreamed would change my life so intensely. Learning to fly with him was magical, bringing space and horizons into my paintings that were previously undeniably and purposefully flat. I began aerobatic training within months, and fell in love with the gyroscopic views and sensations involved with acrobatic flying. That passion that began only a few years ago eventually became the subject of a new body of work: aerobatic flight.
Aerobatic training led me to aerobatic competitions, and I began to compete in the North East region. Competition aerobatics is both addictive and seductive, a “stick and rudder” type of flying that is both very physical and very cerebral. It is a thrill to all of the senses, but the visual presentation trumps the other sensory stimuli. For the five minutes it takes to perform my competition sequence, my world consists of just three things: my body in relation to gravity, my instrument panel, and the horizon outside my windows. Nothing else matters. Allowing myself to be distracted by anything else could be fatal.
Since I began aerobatics, paintings about spins and rolls, loops and tumbles have dominated my visual language. My work has become so entrenched in aerobatics that last year, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum acquired three of my aerobatic paintings for their permanent collection. It was, and is, the perfect venue for me, an institution that venerates both art and aviation.
Yet my idyllic marriage of love, flying, and art came to a sudden halt the day of my husband’s tragic accident a little more than a year ago. On that solstice day in June, the Cessna he was piloting came to an explosive, fiery rest on a suburban street, several hundred yards from the runway it was trying to reach. This was the second, and more life-changing experience: that day altered my life, and hence my artwork, forever. Nothing could possibly have prepared me for the devastation of such a loss. Its impact has spread through all aspects of my life, including my artwork.
I never planned to be an aerobatic pilot. I had been a painter for almost 20 years before flying entered into my life. Now, art and aerobatics are complexly interwoven in my brain, so thoroughly that my paintings depend on the aerobatic experience for their inspiration. And yet, directly beneath the surface of my work lies an equation where flying and death become equals, partners. The passion that fuels my work has also led me to a bitterly close relationship with mortality. This irreconcilable fact filters into my painting, and also into my writing.
Ultimately, the tragedy has led me to a different, more complex body of work that incorporates painting and text. The first year after the accident, I found it impossibly to physically enter my studio—now connected to the event in my mind. Intuitively, I turned to writing as an immediate way of communicating my grief.
Finally, I am back in the studio and painting again. The body of work I am making is a cross-media expression of my experiences over the last year. The new work addresses both flying and widowhood in a personal, quite unpredictable way. My writings find their way into paintings: text as form. To me, aerobatics is, additionally, the hyper-stimulation of both the visual and vestibular senses, and my goal is to continue to create artwork that communicates this multi-sensory, multi-dimensional experience.
Lise Lemeland
2011
