Alex Leith and Chromoluminarism
Phili-based artist and chef talks about artistic process, beauty in death, and considering colors through a pair of paper glasses.
Find Alex on IG: @leithal666
Alex Leith is an artist and chef living in Philadelphia–He points out that there are many creative parallels between cooking and art. He and I met when we both were studying in London during our second year of college. We’re also both from New Hampshire, and we’re both drummers.
Alex’s art has a way of demanding my attention, where the attention grows to appreciation for the strikingly unique piece staring back at me. His technique, the colors he chooses, and the interpretation of his subject matter are all like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It’s truly delightful. I finally had the chance to speak with my old friend in depth about his art and his process, which I think anyone who looks at one of his pieces would be interested in knowing more about.
For context, Alex is the chef and kitchen manager at a restaurant/bar in Philly called Barcade.
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Charlie: Are you making art mostly at home right now?
Alex: Yeah, I’m lucky to have a substantial studio space in our home. That’s mainly where I’m working from. But recently, I’ve been back at work so I’ve been doing some stuff there. I started painting portraits of all the bartenders on the bathroom walls.
What other projects have you been working on?
I started working on a large scale, or at least large scale for me, 4 by 3-foot pastel. I worked on that piece for about a year on and off, the first really long-term piece I’ve worked on. At the same time, I started doing all of these digital and analog collages, I like to think of them as sketches or studies of texture and color relationships between various mediums. They sort of naturally grew out of my working process to serve as exercises for sharpening my eye and balancing compositions while maintaining a certain rhythm I tend to incorporate.I had been working on my iPad, something that was new to me, and began photographing my analog collages and bringing them back into my digital collages…creating pieces that were an amalgam of both. Then I would print them out in various sizes and go back into them again to bring out specific color planes. They’re kind of hard to classify, so I just call them digital collages…maybe they’re paintings? Some of the actual collages are sculptural. It’s complicated.
When quarantine started, I decided I wanted to do another large-scale pastel piece.
Could you describe the subject matter of these pieces?
The pastels are landscapes. So, they have an obvious visual connotation when you look at them, but the test pieces I’ve been working on are not as representational.
I know you’ve incorporated themes of death into your paintings–skulls–could you speak to that?
Every second I get with a sketch book, I’m drawing a skull, or practicing drawing a skull. I’ve done a lot of skull studies.
I like to use this stuff called clay board. It’s like a hard art panel, but the gesso is actually clay, so it ends up being a really beautiful surface for a large array of mediums. You can also scratch into it and bring back out a white line.
Even in these black and white pieces that I’ve also been doing, it’s a whole array of different types of tools and media that I’m using to get the point across, and lots of layers of adding and subtracting-it’s great to have a surface where I can really physically work in texture.
My father is a funeral director so I have had a very close relationship with death my entire life, its just always been there. I find skulls to be a point of meditation, symbolic of both death and life; they really bring hard focus on the nature of duality and coming to terms with it.
Something I’ve also noticed about your work are the colors you choose. They’re so unique and so many. They pull together and provoke a strong feeling. What is your relationship to the color you choose to work with?
I started out oil painting when I was a lot younger. Then I did a lot of drawing and a lot of black and white or monochromatic works up until college. I started taking courses there, and took my first painting class, and subsequently went to Italy for a summer for a painting intensive semester. I fell more in love with color and started using more of it as I progressed through college. Seeing how my classmates and professors handled color really inspired me. I found myself using lots of teals, pinks, white blues, oranges… I’ve been trying to further explore color theory recently using a sort of rhythmic approach to my mark making, and burying colors specifically so it sort of plays with your perception of what’s going on, whether it’s like a really bright, warm red that’s gonna bring something forward, or highlight something…
It’s almost like stippling, but the marks have a certain direction to them. When you’re placing certain colors next to each other they’re going to give you the perception of another color, that’s also the coolest term in art: Chromoluminarism. Anyways, the piece just becomes sort of like one giant puzzle.
I’ve also been using these Chromadepth glasses, they look just like the paper 3-D glasses except the lenses are clear. They’re micro etched with a computer in a specific way so that they end up bringing reds forward, and cool darker colors back. It sort of accentuates what’s going on. When you apply the Chromalumarism technique while also taking into account broader color planes throughout the composition and depth field to accentuate what the Chromadepth glasses can achieve, you end up with a product that sort of…three dimentionally glimmers a bit.
And you used the word ‘rhythmic’ which I can’t ignore, since we’re both drummers.
Drumming and music overall, have a huge influence in the way I approach my work. I don’t have a drum set in Philly, but when I have my drums, I would like work on a piece and step back and have my drum set behind the painting so I could play while looking at the piece, observing it.
A whole lot of creating, whether you’re painting or drawing, is just looking. And not actively making.
When I left New Hampshire and moved to Philly and didn’t have a drum kit anymore, I found myself almost incorporating a tempo into my process. It was something I had previously encountered on a non conscious level but then realized it when I began accentuating it.
And you listen to music while you paint?
Sometimes I’m listening to five YouTube tabs of various soundscapes, sometimes I’m listening to music. Sometimes the news. If I’m going into a long session I try and avoid anything that would detract from my process. Whatever gets you into the zone, someplace you can meditatively contemplate enough for your tools to become extensions of your mind. When I listen to music during the process it’s more instrumental and less vocals. As far as what I’m listening to, it varies a lot. But I feel like music for me aids into bringing myself into that meditative state.
Say you were jamming on your drum kit, with a friend or whatever. Eventually you get to a point where you’re not sure if you’re following the other person, or if they’re following you, and it can feel like there’s some sort of greater creative force. It’s all about trying to get to that point. You know you’re making decisions, but it’s almost like it’s just there in front of you already. Being conscious of the moment and the immediate next. Other times, I’ll just be in my studio, not painting, just staring at works or the wall for an hour and maybe make a couple marks, and that’ll be it. Those times are just as crucial, if not more. You have to play creator and observer and neither all at the same time. I’ve been there, nobody gets there all the time, you just have to keep creating. You’re gonna have bad jam sessions, sometimes the wavelengths just aren’t resonating where you think they are. Sometimes you wake up with one in your head.
What is your overall aspiration with your art? How do you hope to share your art?
A big goal for me is to try and make my art accessible to people. If I can make something with my art that makes a person feel a certain way they want to feel, that’s great, they should have that. Another goal is to be able to make and sell my art and sustain myself just doing that. But also, I do like cooking, and I think it’s important to have another creative outlet. They also inform each other, there’s that same process of detachment and awareness. And I think that drumming and mixing paint was definitely the reason that I was able to wield a chef’s knife pretty well right off the bat.
