About

Robert Lecks, painter, Avon, Indiana.
About me
about 01

I paint in a converted garage on Caldwell Lane, about twenty minutes west of Indianapolis.

The short version: I grew up in Hendricks County, left for a while, and came back in my thirties to a house with enough room to work in.

I studied printmaking rather than painting, which shows. I still build an image in layers the way you would build a plate, and I still think of a finished piece as one state among several that could have happened. For fifteen years I painted after work and on weekends. Since 2021 it has been the whole job.

Where the series came from
Dreamcatcher started as a notebook, not a plan
My mother kept a notebook by the bed and wrote down what she remembered before it went. After she died I found eleven of them, most of it unreadable, some of it very clear. I started painting from those pages and could not stop. The dreamcatcher hanging in her kitchen window gave the series its name, and the idea underneath it is the same. Something is meant to hold the images that pass through at night, and it never quite manages it.
about 02
What I make
Paintings in mixed media on birch panel, mostly between twelve and forty inches. Archival prints of a few of them. And two or three commissions a year, worked out slowly and in conversation.

Acrylic and oil, paper, thread, wax, pressed grass, the occasional photograph that somebody was going to throw away. Birch panel underneath almost all of it, because canvas moves and I want the surface to stay where I put it.

I build a ground first, in layers, with no image in mind. Then I sand parts of it back and look at what turned up. The painting proper starts once I can see something in there worth chasing.

Eleven of them, written between 1994 and 2016. Most of the handwriting is bad and some pages are one word. I work from a page at a time and I do not try to illustrate it, only to make something that feels the way reading it feels.

Two group shows in Indianapolis, one at a library in Danville, and a long stretch of nothing while I was working nights. I am not much good at the exhibition side and I would rather sell a painting to somebody who wrote to me about it.

Contact

Write to me at 317-491-3042 or through the contact page. I am slow to the phone and quick to email.