CLICK IT! Featured Artist: F. Lennox Campello

F. Lennox (Lenny) Campello

Florencio Lennox (Lenny) Campello was born in Guantanamo, Cuba and studied art at the University of Washington School of Art in Seattle, Washington from which he graduated in 1981. While there Lenny helped to create the Arts NW Student Gallery in Seattle, the area’s first art gallery focused on student artwork. He also organized several exhibitions at the School of Art.

In that same year that he graduated from Washington, he won the William Whipple National Art Competition First Prize for Printmaking, the silver medal at the Ligoa Duncan Art Competition in Paris and the French “Prix de Peinture de Raymond Duncan,” also in Paris. In addition to numerous galleries, his work has been exhibited at the McManus Museum in Scotland, the Brusque Museum in Brazil, the San Bernardino County Art Museum in California, the Musee des Duncan in France, the Frick Museum in Ohio, the Meadows Museum of Art in Shreveport, Louisiana, the Hunter Museum in Tennessee, the Sacramento Fine Arts Center in California, The Art League in Alexandria, The Museum of Contemporary Art in DC, the Rock Springs Art Center in Wyoming and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado, the Popov Museum in Russia and the Museum of Small Art in Malaysia. In 2009, world famous American art collector Mera Rubell selected one of his pieces for her 2010 “Cream” auction at the Katzen Museum in Washington, DC. In 2016 The Washington City Paper called him “one of the most interesting people of Washington, DC.

Washington Glass School blog catches up with Lenny as his work is part of the WGS Contemporary online exhibit “CLICK-IT!”.

Washington Glass School (WGS): Describe your artwork method/process.

Lenny Campello: I usually draw with either charcoal or graphite, generally on paper and for the last few years on reclaimed, broken, unfired Bisque. The drawings are most likely part of an ongoing narrative series, some of which I’ve been doing for decades, where I tell and retell stories, or express ideas through the means of contemporary realism. Over a decade ago, inspired by the marriage of embedded video in the glass sculptures of Tim Tate, I started to embed video in my narrative pieces, where I employ the video to further the narration process.  This has further progressed over the years to embedding miniature spy cameras, motion detectors, video recorders, etc. into the artwork.

F. Lennox Campello “Suddenly, She Wasn’t Afraid Any Longer ” charcoal & conte on unfired bisque. Lenny’s artwork is part of WGS Contemporary online exhibit CLICK-IT!

WGS: Describe your work in the show and highlight aspects that the viewers should understand about the work.

Lenny Campello: “Suddenly, She Wasn’t Afraid Any Longer” is part of several of my processes. This charcoal and conte on Bisque is part of my “Obsessive” series. I have probably repeated this image, in various variations and incarnations, over 200 times since the 1980s. The subjects which draw my obsession are diverse and varies. Some of them are iconic people and often comic book superheroes – Frida Kahlo was the first around 1975 when I first saw her works in Mexico City, Elvis, the racist murderer Che Guevara, Monroe, The Batman, Catwoman, Spidey, Superman, etc.  Others, such as “Suddenly, She Wasn’t Afraid Any Longer” is just an image that keeps returning to the blank paper. This one exemplifies lack of fear, taking a chance, a leap forward and away from indecision… freedom.

WGS: How have you handled the Covid lockdown?

Lenny Campello:  Not well… I have not adapted… It sucks! All my time is occupied around the ripple effects of the draconian lockdown and I have not created many new pieces… the ones which have emerged are dark and foreboding.  I am concerned that more people will die eventually because of the Covidian lockdown effects than from COVID-19 itself.

WGS: What artwork/event has moved you and got you thinking about your own work?

Lenny Campello: John Singleton Copley’s dramatic rendering of a shark attacking 14-year-old Brook Watson in Havana Bay – depicted in his painting “Watson and the Shark” has always struck me as one of the greatest narrative paintings of all time! And it made Watson into a celebrity!  Tim Tate’s worldwide impact on art history, in being the first human on the planet to take video away from video players and embedding it into artwork, so that the video became a component of the artwork, not an “artsy movie” to be played on a screen, had the most profound effect on my artwork. I stole his idea – which he developed into glass sculptures – and deployed the same concepts into my drawings and paintings.

F. Lennox Campello “North Atlantic Mermaid (Syreni Caldonii)” artwork in the CLICK-IT! online exhibition.

WGS: if you were not an artist – what would you be?

Lenny Campello: Running a food truck outside some Midwestern University or running a small Cuban restaurant in Brechin, Scotland.

WGS: Do you do a lot of planning in your work – or is there an element of chance while working?

Lenny Campello: Very little planning – other than compositional… and there’s always an element of chance – especially in the blurring of the charcoal, which often reveals unexpected new forms and figures.  Sometimes that leads me to include a double-encrypted form of writing that I’ve developed over the years, where I’ve married ancient Ogham writing with the Navy’s verbal Falcon Codes. I use this to “leave” messages hidden as cracks on the backgrounds of some drawings – these almost always start by “accident”, when I see a shadow or crack developing into a phrase.

WGS: What is your rule of thumb in determining when a work is finished?

Lenny Campello: No rule of thumb – I just know…

Click here to jump to F. Lennox Campello’s work in CLICK-IT!