2011 Original Painting on Panel Weaving #16 (For David) by Mark Leonard 12"x`12"

Details

Description

2011 Original Gouache and Synthetic Resin Painting on Panel by MARK LEONARD
Title: Weaving #16 (For David)
Dimensions:
Painting: 12"H … Read more 2011 Original Gouache and Synthetic Resin Painting on Panel by MARK LEONARD
Title: Weaving #16 (For David)
Dimensions:
Painting: 12"H x 12"W
Frame: 17"H x 17"W
Very good original condition!

MARK LEONARD (b. 1954)

Palm Springs-based painter Mark Leonard trained as an artist before deciding to pursue
a career as a paintings restorer.He earned a multi-disciplinary Bachelor’s degree in Studio
Art, Art History, and Chemistry from Oberlin College, and Master’s degrees in both Art
History and Art Conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Leonard
first worked as a restorer for The Metropolitan Museum of Art before spending twenty-six
years at The J. Paul Getty Museum, with 12 of those years as the Head of Paintings
Conservation. In 2012 he was invited to become the first Chief Conservator at the Dallas
Museum of Art, where he built a new conservation studio and expanded the department.
In 2017, he returned to working full-time as an independent artist.
Leonard’s paintings are done in several stages. An underpaint of gouache first provides
a foundation for the organic movement of the finished surface. A thin brush coat of a
synthetic resin varnish is then applied, and many layers of translucent veils of glazing are
applied with a synthetic resin paint (which Leonard helped to develop). The combination
of these synthetic resin materials with the gouache underpainting results in a surface that
in some aspects mimics the look of an aged oil paint surface but, because of the rigorous
and idiosyncratic techniques required for its manipulation, is otherwise unique. Upon
close inspection, the brushwork on the surface retains a delicate and meticulous sense
of movement, and, when seen from a normal viewing distance, the result is a lush sense
of vibrancy and textures.
At the crux of Leonard’s work lies the interdependence of equal and opposite forces: order
and chaos, logic and feeling, love and loss. This focus is apparent in the artist’s Weaving
works, in which delicately modeled warps and wefts intertwine, entrapped and made
whole by each other in equal measure. Supported on a scaffolding of logical grids, they
are given the space to breathe, unencumbered, with frank emotion and pure directional
energy.
Leonard’s Constable Studies are the product of his time spent as artist-in- residence at
the Yale Center for British Art, where they were exhibited in 2012 alongside the works
that inspired them. The essential geometries of John Constable’s rich cloudscapes are
laid bare, condensed into undulating, rope-like forms and stormy, enigmatic spheres.
Leonard studies Constable just as Constable studied the skies, each endeavoring to
perfect his ability to capture the sweeping spiritual effects of his chosen muse. Where
Constable sought the sublime in nature, Leonard locates it in the logical order he finds at
the heart of a chaotic world. See less