STEPHEN WALKER

DEMONSTRATION: Building Up Shapes and Textures

Step 1

Leeper worked on portrait linen glued to hardboard, toned with a loose mix of transparent red earth and solvent and rubbed back to a lighter tone with a rag. He used asphaltum to draw in his rough design. “I’m just trying to get the big shapes and divisions at this point,” he says. “I’m not going for specific shapes but rather the proportion of the shapes in relation to each other. I’m deciding how to divide up the space and setting the scale and proportions of the composition.”

Step 2

Local color came next in a classic block-in of the major shapes. Leeper used Liquin so this layer would dry quickly. The artist mixed his colors slightly dark, knowing that lighter paint would be added later in the process. He mixed three or four basic colors ahead of time and adjusted them as he went along to turn the forms and make them dimensional and more lifelike.

Step 3

“This is where I needed to be a little more precise in terms of light and shadow,” Leeper says. “Painting with a lot of dappled light can look great right away or need many adjustments. I am willing to change the light patterns all the way to the end of the painting.”

Step 4

Next, Leeper carved away at the tree shadows until he was satisfied with their appearance and how they worked in the composition. Using a No. 2 flat brush, he began to add detail using straight paint — no medium. “I was starting to think about the specific edges of shapes,” he recalls. “With rapid brushwork, I went into smaller areas and built up the textures.” A Celebration of Shadows, 2020, oil, 20 x 24 in., collection the artist, plein air and studio

Final Step

Back in the studio, Leeper refined the painting further. “The painting looks lighter in value here only because it is a better photo,” he says. “At this stage, I am putting in smaller details and adding bright lights and dark darks with a fine round brush. Some paintings don’t go to this level of detail, but the way that tree came across the composition, it needed to be more specific. And that pushes everything in that direction a little further. I finished it in the studio, so I had all the opportunity to build details. If I had finished this on location, it would be much more suggestive.”

LEEPER’S FIVE TIPS FOR A SUCCESSFUL NOCTURNE

1. Paint a much darker ground than you would normally use to start your painting. I use indanthrone blue and a bit of quinacridone magenta.

2. Wipe back your lightest shapes early in the painting. This establishes your design.

3. Use a light that’s not too bright. It’s hard for your eyes to adjust if your painting surface is too brightly lit. I have an LED light that has three brightness settings, and I use the dimmest setting.

4. As you work, your eyes will adjust to the dark and you will begin to see more details in the shadows. Make sure you don’t put too many middle values and details in the painting. Go with your initial impression.

5. Paint your lights opaque and your darks somewhat transparent. This will give your painting more depth. I always mix my blacks. You can use a black tube paint, but be careful that it does not cause your darkest values to get too dense and flat-looking.

instead, a natural in the sense that he has known he would be an artist since he was a small boy.

“My mom was a Sunday painter,” he recalls. “She got me painting pretty early. As a kid my main passion was drawing and painting. It was always going to be my path, and everyone expected that.” Comic books were not the gateway for him, but rather classic illustrations by Dean Cornwell, Howard Pyle, and N.C. Wyeth. Their work for novels centering on legends such as Joan of Arc, Robin Hood, and King Arthur are, in a sense, augmented reality, given that the figures those legends were built upon have scant historical grounding. The illustrations bring to life these mythic heroes. Leeper’s paintings, including Stream Light, offer viewers a beautiful scene similar to what many of us have seen on occasion, but the artist’s enhancements and omissions make the view feel “realer than real.”

Years of painting in the field allows for this mix of convincing depiction and artistic enhancement. Leeper recalls the artist who inspired him on this path. “I remember really liking Andrew Wyeth,” he says. “I would get a Wyeth book out all the time when we went to the library. As a kid, I was amazed that he was painting what I was seeing out there. I was tuned into landscapes from an early age. That and animals.”

A careful look at the demonstration painting opposite, A Celebration of Shadows, shows Leeper’s sure hand and crucial confidence in removing or stressing certain elements in a painting. The limb extending out on the right of the main-attraction tree was painted in, painted out, then painted in again so the artist could compose the piece and, in the end, restore the limb to its proper place in terms of prominence in the composition. “Yes, that limb went away, knowing that it would be put back in,” he explains. “Drawing it in initially gave me confidence that

(TOP) Meet Me for Tea, 2019, oil, 16 x 20 in., private collection, plein air • (ABOVE) Night Yard, 2018, oil, 16 x 20 in., collection the artist, plein air

the design would work. I put it in because it is a player in the composition, but I knew it would get painted out for a bit. I knew this tree was going to be over everything else in the painting, and I knew that limb was going to be so much darker than anything else in the painting. You can make a painting read much more interestingly, as far as depth control, than you can with a photo.” Note that the limb is darkest when silhouetted against the sky and distant shore, even though in real life much of the limb and the overall tree exhibited that level of dark value. Reality is augmented, and the painting reads much more strongly because of it.

A TIME AND PLACE FOR STORYTELLING

Life being unpredictable and often wonderful, sometimes the actual scene is more remarkable than even the augmented reality of the painting. Consider Leeper’s painting Bus Burlesque, a bewitching nocturne painted at the En Plein Air Texas event in San Angelo, Texas. “On the first night of the event, I roamed the downtown area looking for a subject,” he remembers. “When I saw this red bus sitting behind the Dead Horse Saloon, I was thrilled. What an amazing subject! Little did I know that it would be the most memorable nocturne painting of my career.

“It turned out that the bus was owned by a Michigan-based traveling rock ’n’ roll burlesque group. They lived and traveled the country on this bus. As I worked late into the night, the barely dressed female group members would come out to the alley to see my progress. It was a surreal and fun evening of painting. The next day I told some of my fellow artists about my adventure. They didn’t believe me until another artist who was painting in an adjacent parking lot came up and asked if he saw correctly that I was surrounded by naked women as I was painting!”

Leeper is not really a narrative painter. “I’m always aware if there is a narrative there,” he says. “Generally there isn’t, but I’m aware of that, too. Sometimes you look at a landscape and see the narrative, and sometimes that can be too strong. I often see other painters having a subtle narrative running through their paintings. But for me, it’s about shapes and light. It starts with a design that I can see, a painting that I can see. Sometimes really great subjects

Night Wharf

2020, acrylic, 14 x 18 in. Private collection Plein air

present themselves, but I don’t always see a painting there for me. It has to have shapes and light conditions that interest me.”

A MASTER OF MULTIPLE MEDIUMS

Leeper moves easily between media. He is accomplished in using oil, acrylic, and watercolor. “Watercolor is my native language, and I usually bring them along when I go out painting,” he says. “They are harder to use en plein air, and sometimes I don’t want to work that hard or the weather forecast doesn’t look that good for painting in watercolor. I’ve been asked why I change media, and the answer is, sometimes it is just a whim. I think, ‘That would work really well with watercolor.’ Or the weather dictates the medium.” Leeper uses his oil paint box for watercolor, simply placing his watercolor palette on top of the palette portion of the setup and changing the angle of the box so the painting surface isn’t as vertical as it would be for painting in oil or acrylic.

The artist uses a split-primary palette (a cool and warm of the primary colors of blue, red, and yellow) with a few so-called convenience colors, including phthalo green (to make darks by mixing with red), asphaltum, transparent red earth, and a few of the Radiant colors offered by Gamblin, which can serve as pastel versions of the primary colors. He also adds a handful of additional blues to his palette. “I am a blue painter,” he says. “I have ultramarine blue, phthalo blue, King’s blue, Sevres blue, and cobalt blue, and I sometimes add even more blues. I usually bring more colors with me than I end up painting with.”

Leeper uses a Sienna painting holder and a homemade paint box with a glass palette. “I don’t like Plexiglas, so I am willing to put up with the weight of glass,” he says. He carries two bags of art materials. “I’ve tried to consolidate and go smaller, but then I miss having all my stuff,” he says. He primarily uses Rosemary & Co brushes, opting for their 1/2- or 3/4-inch long flats early in the painting process, moving down to sizes 2, 4, 6, or 8 as the painting is refined. He also uses inexpensive synthetic rounds “that I can beat up and throw away” for details, and generally eschews brights and filberts. He has a few soft brushes for blending edges. His preferred surface is gessoed panel, which can handle water-based paint, while oil-based primers cannot.

THE ARTIST’S PATH

Watercolor may be his first love, and oil is the first love of many collectors, but acrylic is best

(TOP) Beech Grove, 2020, oil, 11 x 14 in., private collection, plein air • (ABOVE) Stream Light, 2019, oil, 18 x 24 in., collection the artist, plein air

Morning Light — Essex, 2019, acrylic, 18 x 18 in., collection the artist, plein air quick draw

Annapolis Morning

2018, oil, 12 x 12 in. Private collection Plein air

for some situations, such as nocturnes. “I love nocturnes; they are one of my favorites things to paint en plein air,” Leeper says. “The light never changes, and the weather is usually cooler. The light is dramatic, and it’s a really great time to be outside. I feel very comfortable doing them. As a rule, I don’t do nocturnes in watercolor because they don’t dry as fast and that really slows me down — acrylic is the best for nocturnes.”

He continues, “Also, with nocturnes, the design process is easier. The design is much more obvious at night because so much is lost in the shadows. Paintings get a little simpler, and the compositions more obvious. Nocturnes also inform my other work, because I take those lessons from night painting, in terms of summarizing and not getting caught up in detail, and apply them elsewhere. But you must feel safe. I have packed up and left when it started feeling sketchy where I was painting and I wasn’t with other people.”

With its roots in childhood, Leeper’s artistic path has been long and steady. Along the way, he taught art at the university level for 20 years, and he still conducts workshops. His informed advice to developing painters? “Find the path that is really you,” he says. “Find that inspiration that moves you to paint. If you want to paint horses, paint horses. Don’t listen to what the academics want you to do. Don’t worry what other people say. We have access to so many things, and we hear so many voices. You must gravitate toward something that is you. If we are more honest with ourselves, it makes us better artists. Me, I love being in the woods and I love plein air. It’s who I am as an artist.”

BOB BAHR has written about visual art for various books and publications for 18 years. He lives and works in the Kansas City area.

Bus Burlesque

2016, acrylic, 16 x 20 in. Collection the artist Plein air

Expanded Digital Edition Content

Towpath Nocturne

2017, acrylic, 12 x 16 in. Private collection Plein air

Mill Creek Spring

2020, watercolor, 15 x 22 in. Collection the artist Plein air

Fool in the Rain

2020, acrylic, 14 x 18 in. Private collection Plein air “I was participating in the Paint Grand Traverse event in Traverse City, Michigan, and chose this subject for the pattern of orange umbrellas and reflections,” says Christopher Leeper. “There was no wind, just a steady rainfall. I tucked myself into a doorway of a bank, put my earbuds in, and just lost myself in the painting. This was one of the more pleasant memories of painting in 2020.”

Afternoon Delight

2018, oil, 18 x 24 in. Collection the artist Plein air

Expanded Digital Edition Content

Autumn in Annisquam, 2019, acrylic, 20 x 24 in., available from artist, plein air April Cascade, 2020, acrylic, 12 x 16 in., available from artist, plein air

Hidden Valley Horse Farm

2018, oil, 18 x 24 in. Available from artist Plein air

Nor’easter, 2019, acrylic, 12 x 24 in., available from artist, plein air “In 2019, as the Cape Ann Plein Air festival was ending, a nor’easter hit the East Coast. I just had to try my hand at capturing the drama of the crashing waves. I got permission from a nearby homeowner to use their porch. The wind was ferocious, and the rain was coming straight into my face. I strapped the easel to the porch railing and painted like crazy.”