I first became aware of Leontine Greenberg when I saw her fantastic Dark Crystal piece for Gallery1988’s recent “Crazy 4 Cult” show. Working in watercolors and gouache, her work is fairly sparse, normally a figure or two perched atop a strip of earth. The characters in these little vignettes are animals all, just a few steps outside of their real-world norms. There are tiny, unidentifiable songbirds and gangly, heron-like waterfowl. And there are, of course, the rabbits or, perhaps, The Rabbit; a spindly, hunched creature (or creatures) with a peculiar phonograph obsession — an other-dimensional Nipper.

What I like most about her work (besides the wonderfully rendered figures) is how they seem to hint at but never reveal their world. All these strange scenes appear to take place in some children’s storybook gone sideways — the Hundred Acre Wood and Kenneth Grahame’s pastoral England transposed onto Sam Kieth’s Outback — a world I would very much like to know more about but which is, perhaps, best left up to the imagination.

Posted by Ross Rosenberg on September 27th, 2011
Filed under Art, Flora & Fauna, Surreal