Leoma's Expressionist style lends itself to audience involvement during Paint Out Loud performance

Hi. My name is Tom Hall, and I’m an art journalist, art advocate and author. Leoma asked me to say a word today about Painting Out Loud.

While Painting Out Loud is unquestionably a performance, it is not performance art. The latter is a genre of art which traces its origins back to Futurism and Dadaism and is characteristically employed to express discontent with conventional forms of art, such as painting and traditional modes of sculpture. Performance art almost always gives voice to deeper psychosocial and political issues.

That’s not what Leoma is doing in her Paint Out Loud performances.

In her Paint Out Loud performances, she is demonstrating her own genre of Expressionism. For Leoma, art is not about the subject she is painting. She is not trying to depict a realistic image or an impression or light, shadow and color suggested by her perceptions of the outside world. No, art for Leoma Lovegrove is about conveying her reaction to what she is painting and the subjective emotions she experiences  during the painting process. She accomplishes this objective through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism and fantasy. She enlists intense color, dramatic and agitated brushstrokes and paint drips in her effort to create an emotionally=charged representation of her subject. Nothing is off limits. No principle of perspective or point of view is sacrosanct. It's not that she's unaware of the strictures of fine art. They are subservient to her highly subjective, very personal, spontaneous self-expression, which is what she is sharing with her audience during a Paint Out Loud performance.

Spectators are often taken aback when they watch Leoma paint. Most people equate painting with the slow, deliberate application of pigment to a canvas, wood panel or a wall or ceiling. You will find Leoma at the opposite end of this spectrum. Her brushstrokes are jarring, sometimes bordering on violent. On occasion, she paints with such a sense of urgency that she uses her fingers and even the palm of her hands to move pigment across her canvas or other support.

Whether her motif is religious (such as the painting of Jesus on the cross that she did at Grace United Methodist Church in Cape Coral), political (like the American bald eagle she painted at the Broadway Palm Dinner Theater on the 10^th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks) or a fish or seahorse (subjects she’s painted during performances at Bealls), Leoma isn’t bashful about breaking conventional rules about form, harmony and visual realism.

If you are looking for influences to Leoma’s style of painting, you need look no further to Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. But as an art movement distinct from Impressionism and Post-Impressionist modernism, Expressionism itself traces its formal origins to Germany around the turn of the 20^th century. Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lionel Feininger, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein are some of the leading artists involved in the German Expressionist movement. Norwegian artist Edvard Munch is also considered to be a leading proponent of the Expressionist movement.


Many artists paint live. Impressionist artists frequently paint en plein air in an effort to capture their impressions of light, color and shadow. Even realists are known to paint live during art demonstrations inside and out of their studios. But the viewer or audience in such instances is merely a passive participant. In Paint Out Loud performances, the audience is actively involved on an emotional plane because of the very nature of Leoma’s expressionist style.


And that explains why so many of the people who see one of her performances or paintings feel a visceral, psychological connection with the work. You’ll see what I mean when you attend one of Leoma’s Paint Out Loud performances. Check back for times and locations. You can also follow Leoma on Facebook and Instagram.