|
|
|
|
|
|
A PAINTER OF SIMPLE, HONEST ART
by Glenn McNatt SunPlus, Saturday 5, 2005, The Baltimore Sun Co. Eugene Leake, the big-hearted painter of Maryland landscapes who died last month at the age of 93, never thought of himself as an innovator, though the marvelous brush-strokes of his earth-toned palette made all his pictures seem as distinctive as a fingerprint. "Don't give a damn about it," he told a reporter in 2002 of his place in history. "To be a really important artist, you've got to be an innovator," he went on. "But I'm not." Leake had no need to worry about his legacy, of course, because he was by then so well assured an honored place in the hearts of his fellow Marylanders. That, and the immense personal satisfaction he drew from the creative act of painting, were all that mattered to him. Over the course of his long career, he was an artist, an educator, a college administrator and an inspiration to all who valued the qualities of honesty, integrity and modesty that were the defining characteristics of both his life and his art. His pictures of the fields and woods around his beloved farm in Monkton had the ring of truth to them always, and so did his words. The beauty and naturalness of his paintings gave his vision a quality of inevitability, as if the land itself had guided the artist's hand. And in a way it had: Though he insisted that he painted what he saw, not what he thought, he might have added that he saw as much through his heart as with his eyes. Leake's work was as it was, so wholly his own, because he was able to ignore completely the vicissitudes of art world fashion. He painted according to his own lights only, year after year, decade after decade, trusting that what he had to offer was unique simply because it was is, however distant and unrelated it may have been to that year's Hot New Thing in new York. The strength of some painters, such as Francisco Goya y Lucienes, lies in the unfolding of a tragic vision of life. For others, it is the sunny optimism of a Pierre-Auguste Renoir or Raoul Dufy that sustains the vision. Leake's art is neither tragic nor optimistic; it is what he liked to call "tough," however: the quality of unsentimental appreciation and acceptance simply of what is. He admired the "toughness" he saw in such diverse styles as Gustave Coubet's realism and Claude Monet's impressionism. Leake's own style was unmistakable, though not so easy to sum up in words. Costas Grimalidis, Leake's Baltimore dealer for more than a quarter century, rolled a telling analogy the artist once used to describe his method: "Say you are standing on a hillside and there's a monastery at the top of it and a country friar walking up the road toward the monastery," Leake told Grimalidis. "From where you are sitting you see the monastery clearly but the friar is less than a inch tall," Leake continued. "You know how the friar looks, though, so you can take out the small brush and paint every hair on his head. Or you can take out the wire brush and put down a single brushstroke that denotes the friar, so that when you see the brushstroke you see the friar. That's what I do." Leake's brushstroke was like the man himself: precise, energetic and joyous, and ever attuned to the mysterious universal vibration through which paint is transformed into a living thing. Though his art looked exceedingly simple, it was also miraculous, and for this he was, and will be forever, beloved by generations of Marylanders. THIS ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM January Newsletter Go To Current Newsletter |