“To be free and yet not to lose touch with reality, that is the drama of that epic figure who is variously called inventor, artist, or poet.” – Fernand Leger

Kitchen Wall, unknown Dutch artist, c. 1900

French modernist painter Fernand Leger (1881-1955) inspiringly declared that artists are nothing short of heroic, finding a way to conjure meaning from “the purest and most precise relationships, a few colors, a few lines, some white spaces devoid of depths.” 

“The Beautiful is everywhere,” said Leger, “perhaps more in the arrangement of the pots and pans on the white walls of your kitchen than in your 18th century living room or the official museums.”

“Days and nights,” are what he relished, “dark or brightly lit, seated at some garish bar; renewed visions of forms and objects bathed in artificial light.”

Edgar Degas, In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) – the deadpan, unflinching depiction of “ordinary” days seen in artificial light.

For Leger, the challenge was the high-wire act between representation and abstraction. It’s an extreme version of the basic task that all painters face: to balance on the thin line between the world we all see and the many worlds we carry inside – without losing the connection with reality and each other.

What drives a person to take to that highwire? Or for that matter, to forget all good sense and devote themselves to the smearing of chemically synthesized color across a cheap piece of cloth? What makes someone thrill over a particular shade of blue or green and lose track of time over hand-drawn shapes and edges like some obsessive monk? I don’t know, but sign me up. I’d like to say we can count those moments as victories – little, mad victories of freedom.

Artists are “epic figures,” said Leger, “dominated by that same desire for complete and absolute freedom and perfection which inspires saints, heroes, and madmen.”

“The only people for me are the mad ones,” Jack Kerouac famously wrote in “On the Road,” the novel that helped light the fuse of the American social liberation movements of the 1950s and ‘60s, “the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

Fernand Leger, Mother and Child, 1922

In celebration of painting, and to aid the search for the mad saints and heroes in all of us, here is the rest of Leger’s passage on the delights of the artist:

“Trees cease to be trees, a shadow cuts across the hand placed on the counter, an eye deformed by the light, the changing silhouettes of the passers-by.”

Robert Henri, Cafe at Night, c. 1910

Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, oil (fragment)

“The life of fragments: a red fingernail, an eye, a mouth.”

Rembrandt, The Night Watch (fragment)

“The elastic effect produced by complementary colors which transform objects into some other reality.”

Pablo Picasso, The Death of Casagemas, 1901, 1932

“He fills himself with all of this, drinks in the whole of this vital instantaneity which cuts through him in every direction. He is a sponge: transparency, acuteness, new realism.”

Each artist stretches a high wire of their own. Each must find their own balance, and walk – or dance – their own “perilous” course. That’s the excitement and the challenge. May you, dear reader, find there your own due measure of Leger’s “complete and absolute freedom.”

The quoted passage is from The Writings of Fernand Leger, as republished in Dover Publications’ Painters on Painting Selected and Edited with an introduction by Eric Protter.

Stephanie Birdsall, “Clustered,” oil, 9 x 12 in.

It’s not just about painting from real objects and real light, though those are important; it’s also about pleasing the eye and crafting an exceptional and compelling work of art. It starts with learning to control the light, not only to create the illusion of volume, but also to create a unified feeling and mood. The goal is for painting to have a transformative effect, not only on the artist but on those who experience the work.

Painter Stephanie Birdsall, a master of the expressive still life, sees the painting process as a wholistic moment. In painting from life, she says, ideally the artist interacts with the subject with a sort of intuitive sympathy. 

“When you paint from life,” she says, “the subject, the environment, and you interact as one together.” 

Being in that moment, balancing on that wire – that’s what it’s all about.

>Stephanie Birdsall teaches painting from life as a way of making all of your paintings more dramatic, more lifelike and compelling. Following along in her video “The Natural Still Life: Lemons and Leaves.”