Just Before Dark: "Openings" by Leigh Palmer

Carrie Haddad Gallery
Dec 15, 2017 5:44PM

“I wanted to respond to the new landscape I was seeing, to catch something of the feeling I had just before dark,” says Palmer. “I took a lot of photographs, but I was happier with the paintings I created from memory.”

“Leigh Palmer spent most of his early painting life working in oils”, writes Randi Hoffman of American Artist. He depicted serene interiors, views through windows, and landscapes in a precise, detailed style, sometimes using photographs. Then, in 1987, he moved with his family from suburban Duxbury, Massachusetts, to Tivoli, New York, a quiet town on the Hudson River, north of New York City.

Palmer’s paintings darkened, often capturing the late afternoon light or the moments just before dusk, and he began to try new forms and materials. His subject matter shifted to the sprawling hills and countryside of the Hudson Valley. “I wanted to respond to the new landscape I was seeing, to catch something of the feeling I had just before dark,” says Palmer. “I took a lot of photographs, but I was happier with the paintings I created from memory.”

Around this time, the artist received a set of materials for encaustic painting from a friend and began to experiment with them. Encaustic is a technique of painting with hot wax colors that fuse to a support after they are applied and fixed with heat.

“The process suggests a distinct language of marks. It requires a different painting vocabulary,” says Palmer. “And it’s very permanent, which I like. Also, it hardens in about twenty seconds or so, while oils dry slowly and often don’t appear the way they did when you put them on. With encaustic paints, I can see how my work looks immediately.”

About the same time he began using encaustic, Palmer also started to move away from painting from photographs. “I began to work more spontaneously, making the picture up as I went along,” he says. “Instead of a preconceived idea, I allowed my emotions to come into play. I began working from a place where dreams were taking an inventory of what was inside me.”

He notes that encaustic became a catalyst for this change. “The medium doesn’t always go the way you want it to; you have to follow it,” says Palmer. “I think encaustic provided me with the ability to have accidental things happen as I went along. I had to give up the control I had with oil paint. I’ve ended up doing more interpretive paintings.”


Carrie Haddad Gallery