Now every flower stem swings a censer chain
Evening Harmony, by Charles Baudelaire (transl. by Naomi Lewis)
And every flower gives incense to the night.
Sounds, perfumes circle in the evening light;
Turning in languorous waltz, again, again!
British-American poet W. H. Auden is said to have commented that if presented with five examples of a poet’s work, he should be able to put them in chronological order. The conceit in this claim is that an artist’s work should follow a pattern of discernible development that informs their work. The clear flaw of this premise is that the artist has always had one clear, virtually unwavering goal—they would never stray from their expressive path; that technique would follow an arc of constant refinement.
In the case of many, if not most, artists, that path is not a continuous trail. Rather, the artist’s development comes in fits and starts dependent on experiences, influences, serendipitous occurrence, and flashes of insight. For Les Dorscheid, it’s a path of numerous career opportunities within various disciplines of the arts.
Les began his education in the Madison Area Technical College (MATC), now Madison College, Commercial Art program, graduating in the spring of 1979. He immediately moved to the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, to study illustration at the most prestigious private art school in the country. He enrolled in the Advertising Illustration program but soon transferred to the illustration department because of the greater diversity of field concentrations. There, he was in the company of artists soon to make their reputations in the illustration world: James Gurney of Dinotopia fame; Steve Houston, one of America’s premier figurative painters; Matt Mahurin, creator of the infamous O.J. Simpson Newsweek cover; and Earl Keleny, who made innumerable illustrative contributions to national magazines, such as Sports Illustrated. Les was competing with the very best young artists of his generation.
After finishing at ArtCenter, Les returned to Wisconsin to begin his illustration career. His client list includes companies as diverse as John Deere; Kraft Foods, for whom he completed over 60 paintings; and Harris Electronics. But Les’ ambition was to do book covers, specifically for science-fiction subjects. He worked extensively with a company called Roc Books, a fantasy imprint of the Penguin Group. At the same time, he was heavily involved with the comic title Nexus, written by local author Mike Baron and drawn by Steve Rude. Les did 35 covers for this title all in oil paint, a medium that was less common for illustrators of his generation.
For two more years, he worked as a fantasy illustrator for the Lake Geneva-based gaming company Dungeons & Dragons. Somehow, he managed to fit all of this in while also teaching part-time at his alma mater, MATC, in the renamed Graphic Design and Illustration program, where he was a standout instructor.
Les’ talents came to the attention of Raven Software, a Madison area video gaming developer established in 1990 by brothers Brian and Steve Raffel. Les worked as an art director for Raven for over 15 years before moving to Human Head Studio, now part of Bethesda Softworks and currently owned by Microsoft. When Les left Human Head, he joined Learning Games Network at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, where he helped develop educational games, including Crystals of Kaydor, designed to help identify emotional reading of responses in service to ongoing educational research at the institute.
Seemingly inexhaustible during his career, Les never stopped painting and drawing for himself. Working in fields often bright-lined in distinction from the fine arts, Les continued to explore, learn, and develop as a fine arts painter. He says, “My goal was not to be a landscape painter, it was just to paint. I was always hungry to paint more.”
Les, with support of his wife, Susan, made the decision to retire from the world of fantasy art and video gaming to work full-time as a painter. Finally, he was working exclusively from direct observation, always seeking to push his skills, knowledge, technical mastery, and the breadth of his expressive potential. He did this with two primary objectives: keeping exhaustive painting sketchbooks filled with oil studies and variations of pictorial ideas, and amassing scores of 8- by 10-inch paintings on panel—big enough to be complete in themselves but small enough that he could complete an idea fairly rapidly. These evolved into pieces 12 by 16 inches and larger, always with the goal of improving and deepening his understanding and ambitions as a painter. Eventually, he began making larger and larger pieces on stretched canvas.
Les was greatly aided by decades of illustration experience: experience that refined his draftsmanship to the extent that he could quickly capture any visual experience he encountered. But being a painter is much more than coloring an exquisite drawing. As his approach to painting matured, he was able to “paint what I knew was there before I could actually see it.” Les saw his painting move from executing a plan to something much more organic in evolution. He can now “paint without external prompts. … I can anticipate color reactions before I see them.”
Early landscapes are characterized by strong value contrasts (the lessons of illustration and reproduction compelling those choices) to paintings that are more dependent on color and chromatic interaction. Expressing a sympathy for the work of Gustav Klimt, Les’ work has dramatically grown in chromatic intensity. The visual tension of spatial depiction can now be accomplished with color rather than a dependency on linear perspective or even the presence of a horizon. As shapes become more abstracted rather than literally descriptive, Les manages to both flatten form and enhance spatial dimension. He is no longer dependent on descriptive drawing to tease out spatial nuance. At the same time, the increasingly painterly surface with careful attention to mark making introduces a playful element that challenges standard compositional thinking and even a liberation from subject.
Les has made the precarious journey from the world of illustration to fine art painting like so many before him: Hopper, Mucha, Remington, and a myriad of forerunners. The whole journey is characterized by an integrity and a passion not commonly seen in fellow travelers.
