James C. Leonard: Migrations

James Leonard is one of California’s leading abstract expressionist painters. Working with an extended palette knife and acrylics on canvas, he creates bold horizontal and vertical strokes in strong colors in order to trigger the viewer’s emotions. This basic movement is complemented by the inventive layering of dropped, speckled and fragmented colors that create a sense of additional depth.
Leonard’s paintings have ambient landscape qualities and can have thirty or forty layers in one painting. His final touch employs a technique he calls sgrafito– scraping lines through the upper layers, so the colors of the ground layers show through.