INSIDE THE MIND OF AN ARTIST: Interview with Leslie Allen
Lauren Mantecon interviews Leslie Allen
In this series, we talk with other “successful” artists, how they were influenced and how they came into their art practice.
Leslie Allen is an American painter with 60 years of experience who has been described as a high-octane abstraction. She is currently in Sausalito, CA at the Industrial Center Building. She is represented by Kennedy Contemporary in Newport Beach, CA, and Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, CA. She is also represented in public and private collections all over the world. She has a dual career in Law and Art and on top of that also has a cello practice. While she was working at Lucasfilm she was able to commune with George Lucas' extensive art collection and that jumpstarted her many years of art study.
Allen started off with plein air landscape painting, figure painting, and even cartooning and drawing that was grounded in realistic work. It was a big leap to go into big juicy oil with an "anything goes" approach.
An improvisational style, most of her paintings are responses to the music she is listening to. Over years she realized how it drove the painting. Through studies of synesthesia, she recognizes how art is connected to music. The music is a feeling and a color. “When I listen to music I see a painting, color, and form. They are so much more intertwined than I understood before.” About 20% of the population have the type of synesthesia that Allen has. She feels the music when she's painting and feels the painting when she's listening to music.
LM: “When did you discover that?”
LA: Through reading about Joan Mitchell. At first, I thought it was amazing what was described in her biography. It was a riveting realization that it was no different from what I was experiencing. If I looked at someone and they seemed yellow to me, I would identify them with the color yellow, and their aura. I have come to understand that it is not so weird to have these senses cross. That a smell will evoke a color and the color evoke music and the music evoke an action. Or, numbers and letters signify other meanings.
Allen encourages others to bring awareness to people with synesthesia and the way they process through their senses.
LM: I read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat at a young age and it really affected me. It made me think about being a young artist and the creative process. We think abstractly - even if we don't paint abstractly, and when you study geometry or quantum physics it becomes almost musical and a dance that is not in the 3D world. I really have no words to describe it.
So, what are your main tools?
LA: I paint with everything, brayers, knives, and anything you can hold in your hand. It's there to either add or subtract. Anything goes! Knitting needles, crochet hooks, thread, yarn, Exacto knives, and all sorts of things go into laying down paint or pulling it back up.
LM: Are you a builder of paint or are you in the articulation of belief that I am reductive as much as additive? That there is a balance between the two?
LA: I do more subtractive work than additive. Everything is in terms of layers. If you see blue and yellow are next to each other then in your mind it makes green, but this is not the way it is for me. They are all distinct layers that sit on top of one another. I had painted in watercolors for 25 years before I made the shift to oils. I paint in oils the same way I painted in watercolors. I was not a wet and wet painter. Instead, I did glazes. I love laying down the glazes and sometimes there is a lot of dirty, ugly, and horrible stuff that goes onto a canvas because I know that I am going to paint over it and resolve my emotions in some way such that I come away with something that maybe others are going to resonate with. But, there may be some really ugly graffiti layers underneath and sometimes very beautiful gorgeous stained glass colors that I paint over with black. Then you can erase your processes with all the ways to pull up paint: with paper towels, knives, scraping and putting down and pulling up the tape. Ultimately, it has to be a painting that speaks about the thing it is going to be.
LM: Is color more important than shape to you?
LA: They sit in equal worlds.
Below is a picture of Leslie Allen and her youngest granddaughter. She is candid about having a baby enter her life at that time and all the circumstances around it, which were rather tragic. She learned how to turn something challenging into something beautiful for everyone. At this time Leslie was learning the cello and had to play it every day at any chance she got! Her granddaughter would sit on her lap under the back of the cello- feeling it through her body constantly. Leslie reminisces on that sacred time for her granddaughter, “How beautiful would the world be if we all got the chance to do something like that?”
“Art is Life and Life is Art”
Leslie Allen’s granddaughter grew up feeling the vibrations of the cello.
LM: Art is Life and Life is Art
LA: Indeed!
Next, we dive into some of Leslie Allen’s Influences
Paul Klee Color And I Are One, I Am A Painter
1879-1940
LA: He (Paul Klee) was so ahead of his time. This is an example of the kind of layering that I love in watercolor and in any tapestry of color. Where colors are not sitting side by side. They are letting you in, they are sitting on top and receding and they are all so distinct.
He encouraged everyone to "take a line for a walk."
“Go basic! It's the easiest thing you can even tell a child. "Just take a line for a walk."
It doesn't matter if it's a stick you're dragging in the sand or whether it's charcoal on paper.
Matisse Notre Dame
It was his reduction of all the elements and noise around that structure. It was reduced to the simplest sketch using mainly shadows and light.
It took me years to arrive at this in my drawing. But, this could be a start for some people who are just beginning their drawing life.
Mattisse painted from the perspective of a restaurant across the river. "It blew my mind when I saw it for the first time. Within weeks I then read a biography of Richard Diebenkorn, he referred back to this painting as being pivotal for him. This led Leslie all the way to Notre Dame in Paris to research this painting and understand how this abstraction could occur.
LM: On a guttural and emotional level, what do you assume all these years later is the thing that moved you so much (in the abstraction).
LH: It was his reduction of all the elements and noise around that structure. It was reduced to the simplest sketch using mainly shadows and light. No matter what you are doing in your sketchbook, you will be able to reduce anything you are looking at to simple bones and good design.
It took me years to arrive at this in my own drawings. But, this could be a start for some people who are just beginning their drawing life.
LM: I know that you teach during your "spare" time. So, if someone asked you "do I really need to learn to draw before I paint" what would you say to them.
LH: I hate to push people to do something they don't want to do. When someone wants to learn how to draw, I want them to have all the tools available to learn how to do that.
If they want to be rich and famous right away and bypass the whole drawing thing, I think it's going to show. People will know the distinction between someone who can draw and someone who can't, but it may not make a difference in your career or pursuit.
LM: That is something that comes to mind immediately, Cy Twombly, his markings. At least be able to command your hand, hand-eye coordination, or gesture, or even if it's just taking a line for a walk - over and over again. That is a sense of drawing. It does not have to be a 1-point perspective. What do you think? Should it be a 1, 2, or 3-point perspective?
LH: No, I can tell you of an attorney I worked with for 33 years. He was adored, respected, and very creative, and an art collector, and frustrated artist who wished he'd studied architecture over law. I marveled at his large desk calendar pads with all the Cy Twombley's he made repeatedly. His accumulated marks expressed beautiful form. They really became something!
LM: They become yours …
Watch the Rest of the Interview Here on YouTube
See Leslie Allen’s work here:
Studio300A.com
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