Leigh Palmer

Painter

presented by Carrie Haddad Gallery

    " Until recently, Leigh Palmer had spent most of his painting life working in oils", writes Randi Hoffman of American Artist. He depicted serene interiors, views through windows, and landscapes in a precise, detailed style, sometimes using photographs. Then, in 1987, he moved with his family from suburban Duxbury, Massachusetts, to Tivoli, New York, a quiet town on the Hudson River north of New York City. His paintings darkened, often capturing the late afternoon light or the moments just before dusk, and he began to try new forms and materials. His subject matter shifted to the sprawling hills and countryside of the Hudson Valley. "I wanted to respond to the new landscape I was seeing, to catch something of the feeling I had just before dark," says Palmer. "I took a lot of photographs, but I was happier with the paintings I created from memory."
    Around this time, the artist received a set of materials for encaustic painting from a friend and began to experiment with them. Encaustic is a technique of painting with hot wax colors that fuse to a support after they are applied and fixed with heat. "The process suggests a distinct language of marks. It requires a different painting vocabulary," says Palmer. "And it's very permanent, which I like. Also, it hardens in about twenty seconds or so, while oils dry slowly and often don't appear the way they did when you put them on. With encaustic paints, I can see how my work looks immediately."
    About the same time he began using encaustic, Palmer also started to move away from painting from photographs. "I began to work more spontaneously, making the picture up as I went along," he says. "Instead of a preconceived idea, I allowed my emotions to come into play. I began working from a place where dreams were taking an inventory of what was inside me." He notes that encaustic became a catalyst for this change. "The medium doesn't always go the way you want it to; you have to follow it," says Palmer. "I think encaustic provided me with the ability to have accidental things happen as I went along. I had to give up the control I had with oil paint. I've ended up doing more interpretive paintings."

Recent Exhibitions: 2001, "Juried Show", Columbia County Council on the Arts, Hudson, NY;
2000-01, 2000, "Dealers Choice", Bridgewater/Lustberg & Blumenfeld, New York, NY; 1999, "Encaustic Works '99", Watermark/Cargo Gallery Kingston, NY; Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY; 1999 Barbara Singer Fine Art, Cambridge, MA; 1997 The Main Street Gallery, Nantucket, MA; Randall Tuttle Fine Arts, Woodbury, CT; 1994 "Winter Group Show", James Cox Gallery, Woodstock, NY.

Education: 1968-69 Boston University, Graduate Film Studies; 1962-66 R.I.S.D. Providence, RI, B.F.A

Artist Statement: These paintings, which are descriptive of the landscape where I live, are improvised in the studio; the images are found or discovered in my memory of familiar places during the slow process of their making. This method and the sometimes unexpected results which arise while employing the encaustic medium support my intentions to infuse the ordinary locals with suggestions of melancholy, dreaminess, déjà vu, loneliness, and isolation, contrasted with the well-being, satisfaction, security and stability which the viewer might associate with the pastoral settings. The works deliberately lack the grandiosity and optimism of the paintings of the Hudson River School which they may recall, but they employ (and comment on) some of the same pictorial conventions and traditions.

Additional Reviews: By Jeanette Fintz, Register Star, Hudson.
....Leigh Palmer's sublimely dim dusk (or dawn) landscapes in the center gallery make us aware of the role subjectivity plays in perceiving our surroundings by raising some mysterious questions, and coaxing us to formulate at least some of our own answers.
On first viewing "Untitled Landscape #8", I experience a jolt of recognition, whether derived from the memory of someplace actually seen and recalled or perhaps a photograph or print residing in my image-loaded memory banks.
The time of day, chosen for depiction emphasizing value over color contrasts, and the bold silhouettes of night vision, only slowly allows one's eye to accustom itself to other nuances of change; this can itself be a metaphor for a slowly awakening consciousness. Close value and monochrome with the exception of two pieces, these works resemble monoprints, the dark tones actually functioning as a filter or film behind which the landscape unfolds. Imminence of a storm, daylight or nightfall adds drama and ambiguity to these paintings on paper.
    In some of them, particularly "Untitled Landscape #4", my inner eye began recalling the introductory description of the landscape in a Thomas Hardy novel, where the earth's crevices and hillocks contain human mysteries.
    These are not narrative pieces, yet at their best, they hold the promise of stories unfolding with the fields and behind the hedgerows. The rising glow of light at each horizon or line of sight reinforces a glimmer of expectation in the best pieces, such, as (in) "Untitled #8", where diagonally placed hedges move the eye backward. Palmer is in impressive control of all his technical skills, from the smallest mark and smudge, the scratch and shape -change that create scale to the organizing geometry composing each space. The civilizing imprint of repetitive man-made structures on such a romanticized rural vision (think Breughel) literally adds a modern design element to some of the pieces particularly the eerie greenish "Untitled Landscape #10" which has one of the shallowest spaces, yet remains atmospheric.

Selected Paintings

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1.)

Untitled #2, 2000,
encaustic on canvas mounted on board,
16 x 18,
$2,200.00