“Consistently vibrant”: Kirkus Reviews on The Skyscraper and the City

A nice advance review came the other day for The Skyscraper and the City from Kirkus Reviews, a leading book review service that many librarians and booksellers rely on. Kirkus publishes reviews of a vast number of books, but most of them simply appear with little fanfare online. Someone from Kirkus phoned this morning to let me know that this review will appear in the 15 November issue of Kirkus Reviews Magazine, which goes out every two weeks to about 15,000 libraries, bookstores and other subscribers.

The reviewer isn’t keen on much of the content of the long captions I wrote to accompany many of the images. (I steer clear almost entirely of theorizing the paintings, and instead tend to say something about the subject matter, or about my own life when I was creating the work.) But the book’s main focus is the paintings themselves, and the reviewer likes those very much. The full review can be found online (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/don-lepan-2/the-skyscraper-and-the-city/). Here’s an excerpt:

LePan presents a collection of charming watercolor cityscapes accompanied by commentary, in this retrospective of his three-decade career. … [The book] features dynamic urban scenes in which light operates without conventional logic: “Broad swaths of light sweep and swoop down and across and up and away,” lending skyscrapers, bridges, and monuments a “friendly but fierce and almost otherworldly energy.” The artist’s loose, gestural approach offers a refreshing departure from the rigid linear representations that typically characterize urban landscapes. LePan’s “mind’s-eye painting” … approach yields consistently vibrant results; outstanding examples include his breakthrough Chicago (1994), in which the Sears Tower and Merchandise Mart pulse with raw metropolitan energy, and New Orleans (2007), which captures both post-Katrina devastation and the city’s irrepressible vitality through bold color contrasts and flowing forms.

PS I will paste in below details from the two paintings the reviewer singles out--Chicago (1994) and New Orleans (2007)