Anne Leone's paintings explore the buoyant world of figures under water
Originally published in the New Bedford Standard-Times on April 28, 2007
Anne Leone delights in being a
storyteller. But the stories in her scenes of submerged swimmers are not
clear-cut narratives with chronological plot lines or definite endings. The
artist describes her characters and defines her settings through the colors of
the waves and the choreography of the figures. She offers the viewer "a
moment of heightened awareness" captured on canvas.
Growing up in New Jersey, Ms. Leone loved to read. As a
little girl she enjoyed the talking animals and palace scenes in "scary
but magical" fairy tales. Later she pored over her mother's coffee-table
art books on master figure painters, from the flamboyant Delacroix to the
precise Ingres. She excelled in art and English as a
student at the Dana Hall School in Wellesley. Here she studied with art
teachers Scattergood Moore and Phyllis Scattergood, husband and wife, who were
surrogate parents to Ms. Leone in the boarding school setting. It was Ms.
Scattergood who urged Ms. Leone to apply to the art program at Boston
University.
Ms. Leone "adored" her
professors at the university. One of her favorites, Joe Ablow, taught her that
art was "an intellectual pursuit, not just a skill-oriented recording of
what you see." She recalls one particular meeting of Mr. Ablow's senior
seminar course, when renowned painter Philip Guston was the guest speaker. The
conversation between Mr. Ablow and Mr. Guston "opened my eyes to the way
painting could be as challenging and rewarding as literature and science,"
she says. Ms. Leone particularly enjoyed her
studies with "tough but kind" professor Reed Kay, who taught painting
in a wide range of media from egg tempera to encaustic (hot wax) to oil.
The figure was Ms. Leone's favorite
subject, and her figure paintings were often singled out by her professors as
among the strongest in the class. Her work was also noticed by a new student
who transferred to Boston University during Ms. Leone's junior year, Daniel
Ludwig. At first, the two of them sized each other up as competition, but soon
they were a serious couple, and later husband and wife.
After graduating from Boston
University, Ms. Leone and Mr. Ludwig relocated to Kentucky. Here the young
artists lived as caretakers in a farmhouse on a hay and tobacco farm, in
addition to waiting tables and painting as much as they could. In her small
studio, Ms. Leone painted a series of self-portraits, but she missed working
from the model on a grand scale, as she had at college. She applied to graduate
school at the University of Cincinnati, where she was granted a full
fellowship. Mr. Ludwig soon joined her, and they both earned their master of
fine art degrees from the university.
Directly after graduation, Mr. Ludwig
was offered a teaching position at Salve Regina University, so the couple moved
to Newport, R.I. The following year, Ms. Leone accepted a professorship at the
UMass Dartmouth's College of Visual and Performing Arts. Ms. Leone's studio work at this time
involved landscape paintings influenced by the lush gardens of Newport, works
she exhibited at the London gallery Cadogan Contemporary. During visits to
Europe in conjunction with her shows, she toured London's gardens and gathered
further ideas for landscape imagery.
With the birth of her son, Ellis, Ms.
Leone experienced a burst of intense energy and inspiration in her studio. She
switched from oil paint to acrylic, and taught herself to use the new media to
mimic oil's luminosity and richness of color. Figures now entered her garden
scenes, introducing mysterious and unspoken narratives into the pictures. These
works reminded the artist of short stories, with an underlying psychological
tension implied among the characters.
Ms. Leone first tapped in to the
possibilities of water as an environment in a series inspired by her excursions
with Ellis to Roger Williams Park Zoo and the New England Aquarium. These
paintings depicted the swimming polar bears and fish they encountered on their visits.
The first manifestations of the human
figure in water came in a group of portraits Ms. Leone made when she was
pregnant with her daughter, Madeline. She painted her husband, her son and
herself, each jumping in to a body of water in a way that reflected their
varying states of mind in anticipation of the new baby. Mr. Ludwig, elated at
being a father for the second time, was shown plunging off a cliff into the
ocean in a "moment of exaltation." Ellis, looking forward to a new
companion, splashed in a shallow puddle, dancing with his reflection. Ms. Leone
portrayed herself as hesitant but determined, jumping into a pool at night.
Figures moving under water have
remained the central focus of Ms. Leone's work since 1993. Each series develops
from season to season with variations in color schemes and the use of
individual or groups of swimmers, reflections of changes in her personal life.
But the reference to water remains constant.
Her fascination with this subject has
been sustained over the years by three qualities that water alone can offer.
Water has no color of its own, and thus provides the chance to express a range
of emotions based on the psychological impact of the entire spectrum. Water has
no form, so it presents a technical challenge to describe a convincing physical
depth. And water has no gravity, making unique poses possible because of the
figures' weightlessness. "It's a wonderful feeling when
you're all by yourself in water, reacting to its buoyancy," says Ms.
Leone. "It gives you an 'in-the-moment' feeling."
To create a painting, Ms. Leone
photographs the human body moving under water, often using her family members
as models. She picks out the shots with the most visually interesting poses and
interactions of bodies and limbs. Then she turns to the computer to consider
the dynamics of color and light, experimenting with different possibilities in
Photoshop. She tacks her favorite printouts to the wall beside her easel for
general reference and begins painting on stretched linen prepared with sanded
layers of gesso.
First the artist places the major
forms with lines of thinned paint, then blocks in tonal contrasts. Next comes
the application of color, laid on with both brushes and knives, to create the
illusion of realistic forms moving through a believable three-dimensional
space. Foreground areas are defined, while the background is softened. Also the
"ceiling" of the water's surface must be brought into focus.
At regular intervals, Ms. Leone
applies a coating of acrylic gloss medium over the entire painting, as if to
encase the image in a "thin sheet of glass or ice." This technique
unifies the surface and helps to create the impression of water engulfing the
figures.
This process of layering pigment and
gel continues until the underwater drama has come to life.
Ms. Leone currently finds herself at a
professional crossroads. She has just announced her retirement from teaching at
UMD, and plans to turn her attention to full-time painting. She looks back on
her career at the university with great fondness for her colleagues and for the
many students she has nurtured during her 20 years as a professor there.
She counts among her experience seven
years as director of the Fine Art Department's Foundation Program. But with
Ellis about to head off to college and Madeline settled in middle school, now
seems like a good time to her to make this change.
In future work, Ms. Leone plans to
create paintings on an even larger scale and explore more complex interactions
between groups of swimmers. Like Dickens and Shakespeare, her favorite writers,
Ms. Leone is first and foremost a storyteller, describing the range of human
experience through the non-verbal language of color and form in space.
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