Ah, the Las Vegas art scene — what is there to say? For one it’s been a fickle ride. There was the folding of the Las Vegas Arts Museum earlier this year and the closing of the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in May 2008. Godt-Cleary Projects, Dust Gallery aka Naomi Arin Contemporary Arts, and White Square Gallery have also all gone by the wayside.

But wait, it’s not all grim news and shuttered buildings. There is still the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art which has shown everything from Monet to Warhol. And there’s also a burgeoning corporate art culture taking shape ala CityCenter and Nevada Cancer Institute. And not to overlook the many smaller galleries that litter downtown including Trifecta Gallery, Henri & Odette, Contemporary Arts Center and Atomic Todd’s.

And so it would seem we are left with a miles wide disparity between the corporate art machine and the grassroots arts community with a stark middle ground that includes merely one free-standing building, Brett Wesley Contemporary Art that opened only last month, dedicated to art in the truest sense. Although it presents a challenging if empty void, there are still artists toiling in Las Vegas making art and hoping for audiences and collectors to find their works.

We found three such local artists laboring in near anonymity: Kevin Chupik, Jennifer Main and Leslie Rowland. All creating art in a city definitely not the most fertile for breeding an arts community and yet like buds sprouting in the spring, they forge on hoping to bring new life to the desert’s barren arts scene.

Kevin Chupik
STIPPLED SOVIET STRUMPETS

Culling the recesses of his memory, painter Kevin Chupik recalled “ideas of espionage and a single-minded war machine from an era filled with dark motives” as inspiration for his latest body of work which is fraught with tarted up Ruskies donning military uniforms.

“The focus of ‘Soviet militaria’ seems to spring from my youth in the ’70s and ’80s which was filled with Soviet villains throughout pop culture. There was one protagonist you could count on being there, a stoic nemesis that was the epitome of the word ‘enemy.’ Whether it was Rocky battling Drago or Reagan battling the ‘Wall’, there were plenty of chances to take on the mysterious, singularly evil Soviet Russia,” explains Chupik.

Calling his latest paintings colorful, militaristic and sexy, Chupik says, “because I don’t think those three words go together, and that they are such a juxtaposition, is what is intriguing to me. To pair traits of extreme masculinity with femininity creates a provocative contrast.

“The bright color has the ability to enliven each piece with brightness and levity that almost suggests a humorous, non-threatening satire of themes that could be potentially quite dark and heavy.”

Chupik’s glammed up Soviets are a reference to pop imagery and “is the stipple updated. I chose stipple/pixel marks as a way to modernize iconography from the past. Many artists have worked in a pseudo pointillist style.” He notes Chuck Close as ever present as a modern art historical reference but declares he hasn’t sought to mimic him whatsoever, instead that he is “drawn to the idea of reducing shape to its most element existence investigating form and surface on an intricate level.”

Currently an instructor at the College of Southern Nevada, Chupik has transferred his fixation with the most elemental of shapes to his students. “I strive to stress shape’s importance when I work with students learning the basics of image making. Whether it’s drawing, design or painting, I think that it was this simplistic notion of trying to reduce the mark, which I could make with a brush, to a vocabulary of simple choices that when compiled produce a quite complicated surface of diverse color and shape.”

The stipple paintings took monastic dedication to execute, according to Chupik. Each of the larger pieces took upwards of 250 to 300 hours to finish. He has been painting for 9 to 11 hours each day since February to prepare for his current exhibit on display at the Brett Wesley Contemporary Art.

Painting for 20 years, Chupik became seriously dedicated to his art in college, receiving his Master of Fine Arts in painting and drawing from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Over the years, Chupik has had many part-time gigs so as to pursue art. “An artist does a number of things to sustain him or herself­­—some of them pleasant, some not so. These have all been distractions from my true calling. It’s like you are running from what you should be doing,” he explains, and then quickly clarifies, “It’s like you are on a wrestling mat with your opponent and you don’t ever find a conclusion.”

Chupik notes that he has gotten more intense and dedicated to painting as the years have gone by but still is in pursuit of exposure. “I don’t think any artist wants to exist in anonymity, it’s counter to expression. Five years down the road, an ever burgeoning national identity would be nice.”

Jennifer Main
THE MAIN DISH

This artist found her calling early in life like most artists do but unlike most — success quickly followed. Jennifer Main had been casually creating art since she was three years old but decided while still in junior high that it was time to get serious about it. Her first step was to attend the Las Vegas Academy and International Studies, Performing and Visual Arts for her high school studies.

Gaining confidence and having sold a couple of pieces while studying at Las Vegas Academy, Main had the savvy to approach a local gallery with her work at just 17 years old. She recalls the moment vividly.

“It was nerve wracking, and I just had two pieces of poster board stapled together to use as my portfolio,” she tells of her experience at Art Encounter in 1998. “When I went to the gallery, they said they had never shown anything like what I was doing before but they gave me a chance to see how it would work. One of my pieces sold in the first week, and then it never stopped after that.”

Describing her work as whimsical, colorful, symbolic and expressionistic, Main has always had a fascination with art. “I always thought it was so cool to see this piece of paper go from nothing to having something on it that was beautiful. That was the one thing that always kept me excited so I continued to explore it more. It was neat the response I got from people, and that gave me the idea more that I could do this for a living.”

Citing her early influences as Salvador Dali and Picasso, Main started with cubism then later her work became more expressionistic and she references Keith Haring and Frida Khalo as artistic mentors.

“I try to communicate a lot more through the work now. Before I would paint more in the cubist style and now I paint more with a purpose. It’s a combination of both cubist and expressionist,” Main explains.

Eleven years later, Main’s talents have allowed her to make a living. She has just opened her own gallery so she doesn’t have to trepidatiously show her work anymore. But it’s taken a lot of hard work and big decisions to get to this place.

Initially Main thought she wanted to attend an arts college and even spent a summer at the Chicago Art Institute. “I learned a lot from that but decided to get right out in the real world,” Main explains of her brief stint in Chicago, adding, “I did get a lot of good training at Las Vegas Academy.”

From there, her savvy resurfaced with the idea to donate her pieces to charity. “In the beginning I used to do a lot of charity events to get exposure. I took every opportunity I was given. Everything led to something else and I would build on each thing,” she explains.

Main believes her success goes far beyond having her own gallery. “I have achieved success by being able to express myself and paint what I want.

“But I still have goals for the future. A big one is to get outside of Las Vegas and spread the artwork, and maybe move to a gallery on the Strip in the next five years or so. But I am extremely happy that I have reached success in being able to do what I want to do.”

Leslie Rowland
GLOSS & SHIMMER

Las Vegas Artist Leslie Rowland says creating her current body of work is like “trying to fry the top of crème brulee with a dragon’s tail.” Having worked with both jewelry and furniture, she goes on to explain that it’s delicate work and not a medium that lends itself to control

“I was looking to play a little bit more on canvas. But I wanted to do a new medium,” she continues. “I like iridescent, sparkle, depth and I like things that are free flowing. So I experimented for awhile until I came up with a medium that would give me all those things.

“I have taken some traditional and nontraditional techniques with some traditional and nontraditional medium thrown in and added some unexpected ingredients and twists,” she says of her latest paintings that are awash in pooling streams of iridescent color and topped with a glossy finish.

“I love art so much but I try really hard not to be influenced by other people’s work. I think we have enough mimics in the world. I think we are all tired of seeing the same thing over and over again,” she explains of the philosophy behind creating her latest body of work.

But the paintings, that the self-taught artist describes as visceral, intuitive, and a kind of lucid dreaming, are more than just a canvas of mesmerizing images, the works’ titles are a whole other story.

“The title of the pieces are the best indication of what I was thinking when I painted them or what I was thinking about. These are all attempts to communicate feelings without words. Sometimes I think words are clumsy,” explains Rowland as to how she got to some of the titles that include: He Whispered Something about Spain, Her Perfume left a Scent of Jasmine in the Air, Into the Arms Eden, and Dreams of Eden Before the Apple.

For many years Rowland tried to suppress her artistic talents pursuing a degree in Environmental Science, doing volunteer work in Bolivia with Conservation International, and even owning a garden design company that specialized in being water smart and using as many native species as possible. “I am a total tree hugger, there’s no getting around it,” she explains of her former careers.

But her art seems to have finally won out. “I think it’s (art) such a part of me,” she says of embracing something that she could no longer ignore. However, she hasn’t given up on her granola past. “I am always going to be actively creating art. But I am also hoping to find a way to use my creative mind in conjunction with my degree in Environmental Studies to work in green design or environmental writing, pursuing some aspect of being creative.”

Rowland believes there are two ways to define success as an artist. “Whether you are communicating successfully through your medium and making the impact that you hoped for. The other, of course, is monetary. And those should be separated because some of the greatest artists in the world never made a dime. My first goal is to make people think and to feel, and paying the bills is a nice benefit,” she adds.