Lenard Kester’s popular appeal is based on a kind of romantic imagery that makes use of the recognizable object but surrounds it with the unrealities of the dream world. Although his style draws heavily from both Social Realism and Surrealism, strictly speaking, it is neither of these. Its nostalgic mood has been compared to that definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Here popular taste and the taste of the contemporary art world part company. Neither such a definition of poetry nor its translation into visual images is acceptable as apropos of today’s intellectual or artistic thought. It seems rather to be symptomatic of an escapism—of a rejection of reality and the meaning of life. Kester is, however, a fine painter, capable of producing some exquisite passages of color and texture. If anything, he is too capable. Even the process of painting becomes a cliché. It is redundant as are the chairs, tables, gates, lamp posts, fences, doors, architectural fragments and even the nuns in their gracefully blown habits that occur and recur with little more than decorative meaning. They set the stage but no drama takes place.
—Constance Perkins
