Leigh Palmer

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Landscapes

Bluff, 1998	Streak, 2007	Kingdom, 2005-7
Incident, 2007	Domain, 2007	Orchard, 2007
After Leonardo, 2006	Lake

Encaustics

Encaustic works are created with melted beeswax mixed with dried pigment or oil paint.  This is an ancient process which has become quite popular in recent years.

Opening No. 11, 2010	Opening No.14, 2010	Farm, 2008

Works on Paper

Untitled, 1997

Untitled #30, 1999

Artist Statement

 My paintings are based on observation of the landscape in the Hudson River Valley where I live, and are improvised in the studio; the images are found or discovered in my memory of familiar places and developed during the painting process. Human beings do not appear, but their presence is felt in the marks left on the ground (furrows, fence rows, roads), and sometimes in the air (smoke, haze).

The Hudson River School weighs heavily on the landscape painter here, and the influence must be grappled with. I cautiously take energy from the tradition, but I choose humble locations and treat them more introspectively than most of those 19th century painters did.

The window has returned to my paintings after a long furlough. Now it is in the form of a frame or a mat which may also be read as an opening in a wall.  Recently,  I have been using metal leaf around the edges which creates a kind of frame while remaining an integral formal element of the painting.

I use beeswax (encaustic) paint because, in its unruliness, it encourages the accidental. It is almost impossible for me to use it to render, and I get an expressive, rough, sometimes dream-like product: I surprise myself. The surface can be scraped and sculpted, worked as one might work the ground with a hoe or rake.

Artist Bio