Why I paint celebrities, flags and other pop culture images

Before I share stories about the paintings in my Beatles collection, I want to first say a few words about the reason I paint celebrities and entertainers like The Beatles, Johnny Depp, Steven Tyler as well as flags hearts and images like that. Simply put, it’s because I’m interested, just like you, in popular culture and classical brands like flags and celebrities.

Pop art has been around since the 1950s. You remember Andy Warhol, right? He’s the New York artist who became famous for mass-producing paintings, prints and silkscreens of Campbell soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and even Chairman Mao. Another New York artist, Jasper Johns, painted American flags. Robert Indiana painted the word love in all capital letters. Jim Dine painted a series of hearts. Robert Rauschenberg incorporated images of JFK into many of his prints. And today, photographer Chuck Close creates hyper-real images of celebrities like Brad Pitt and Cindy Sherman, blemishes and all.

Each of these artists used their own unique style and media to create pop art images, and so do I. But for me, it’s more about the emotions I feel when I think about and paint these popular images. That’s because I'm not merely reproducing or mass producing images on a piece of cardboard, canvas or a wooden door. Each celebrity, each flag, each of my heart paintings or Love Letters uniquely expresses my personal and internalized feelings about the subject I convey.

Sometimes the emotion I’m expressing is nostalgia, as is true of the Beatles series. At other times, it’s love of country and the patriotism that courses through my veins, as is evident in my series of American flags. On other occasions it may be love or sympathy for people who are battling cancer. And I express these emotions or moods by means of the brushstrokes or handstrokes I use and the color palette I choose.

I’ll explain more in the next few blogs as I tell you about the individual paintings in the Beatles series I told you about in yesterday’s blog.

How I came to paint The Beatles

In addition to my Paint Out Loud sketches, studies and paintings, my retrospective in January at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center will include a series of paintings I’ve done of The Beatles. I’ve done entertainment art over the years, and my paintings of Johnny Depp, Steven Tyler and The Beatles  are popular with the folks who walk through my Matlacha gallery each day.

While I was always a fan of The Beatles and their music, I wasn’t over the top. But my sister certainly was. I remember to this day when we sat down to watch them perform for the first time on the Ed Sullivan Show. I was in awe as I watched them play. John, Paul, George and Ringo were so cute. And their music was like nothing we’d ever heard before.

But all those girls in the audience screaming and crying like that? Really?

Then my sister started throwing jelly beans at the television screen. It was George Harrison’s fault I later learned. He’d told an interviewer the year before they invaded the United States that Jelly Babies were his favorite treat and that John Lennon, ever the prankster, kept stealing them from him.

Within no time at all, fans began sending the Fab Four boxes of Jelly Babies. It wasn’t long before fans started throwing Jelly Babies at The Beatles when they performed. It turns out that the foursome didn’t appreciate the gesture the least little bit, but my sister hadn’t gotten the memo.

While I wasn’t as avid a fan as my sister, I did like their music. And like other fans, I was sorry when they decided to quit touring 50 years ago this past August 29 - and even sadder when the band broke up, John was murdered and George died of lung cancer. But I didn’t paint the group until much later. It was during one of my visits to Monet’s gardens in Giverny, France.

After leaving France, my husband and I attended a book signing in London for The Beatles in Rishikesh that was written by Paul Saltzman, who took photos of The Beatles while they were at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in India. He was there learning Meditation and took pictures not only of The Beatles, but of everyone else who was there as well - Jane Asher, Cynthia Lennon, Pattie Boyd Harrison, Maureen Starkey, Mia Farrow and Mike Love.

I bought a copy of the book and got it signed. The book and the signing inspired Mike and I to visit the Beatles shop in London to see if they had any interest in the paintings I’d done in Giverny. Although the shopkeeper didn’t carry art in his store, gave me the name of a gallery owner in Liverpool who he thought would want to buy my paintings.

Equipped with only a credit card and the rolled canvases I had tucked tightly under my arm, Mike and I headed straight for the train station and bought two tickets to Liverpool. The train was already moving when we jumped on and made our way to our seats. Liverpool wasn't just around the corner. By train, it's a three hour ride.

We discovered something remarkable when we arrived in Liverpool later that afternoon. We quickly learned that the locals were over The Beatles. While they were friendly and engaging, their attitude was, “There’s more to Liverpool than just The Beatles.” Undeterred, we visited The Cave (the club where The Beatles performed before they became famous) and the museum before we found the gallery owner the shopkeeper in London had sent us to see.

 

It turned out that he was in the process of setting up his gallery, and he had all this art leaning on the walls. But none was of The Beatles, and he leapt at the chance to put my paintings on the walls. Even if the locals were over The Beatles, their fans still made pilgrimages to Liverpool and he knew that my paintings would sell very well.

Mike and I returned to Matlacha, but by the time I finished and framed the four he wanted, the Liverpool dealer had already closed his gallery and gone out of business. Go figure.

But they’ve been a popular item at Lovegrove Gallery and Gardens and so I decided a few years ago, in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the date when they first came to the United States that I’d do a series of 12 paintings which incorporated the 12 principles of basic design. It’s this series that I’ll tell you more about here in my blog, and it’s this series you can see for yourself during my retrospective in January at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center.

 

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.


 

Painting Out Loud performances are planned, scripted and choreographed

A lot of people who attend my Painting Out Loud performances think I just get up on stage and paint. Actually, when they tell me that, I take it as a great compliment. But like any performance, everything I do is planned out, scripted and choreographed.

The first order of business when I’m planning an event is to choose a theme. Sometimes the choice is obvious. I did my very first Painting Out Loud performance at Grace United Methodist Church in Cape Coral on Easter Sunday, so I painted a close up of Jesus on the cross. For their Christmas service later that year, I chose Coming of the Magi as my motif.

As I said in yesterday’s post, I painted The Doors for Doors of Opportunity, and I did a rendering of an angel for the Alliance for the Arts’ 2011 Angels of the Arts Awards, which celebrate the contributions that artists, arts organizations and benefactors make toward our quality of life.

Once I know what I am going to paint, I sketch the portrait or scene. After that, I go into my studio, crank up the music, and do a number of studies on progressively larger pieces of cardboard, finishing with a larger work on Masonite.

It’s not enough to perfect the image I intend to paint during the performance. I have to develop a step-by-step process that will enable me to complete the entire painting in 20 minutes or less, which is all the time I typically have during a church service, corporate meeting or charitable event.

Because of the time constraints, I can ill afford to be fumbling for the right brush or the pigment or squirt bottle I need at a given point in the process. To finish on time, every brushstroke and paint drip has to take place in order and on time.

Depending on the motif and venue, this could take as little as four or five days or as much as two weeks. It's an intensive, time-consuming process that has to be undertaken with care and forethought.

 

At the same time I’m refining the image and the steps I’ll follow from start to finish to complete the painting in the time allotted to me, I prepare a script of what I am going to say to the audience while I’m painting and choose the music that will be playing in the background. Here again, there’s no room for distractions or pregnant pauses. Everything has to be tightly choreographed because of the time constraints involved.

I’ve kept most of the paintings I’ve done during my Painting Out Loud performances, and I will be exhibiting many of them together with the preparatory sketches and studies at my retrospective at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center in January, 2017. That said, there are two exceptions. Remember 9-11 Tenth Year is now part of the permanent collection of Florida Gulf Coast University and on view in the east library at FGCU.

And I’ve actually sold a couple of studies. One of my cardboard studies was purchased by a collector who was taking a tour of my studio one day, and I cut up another into note cards which another collector purchased and pieced back together again and framed.

You can see the studies and the process I employ in my Painting Out Loud performances in Palettes: Past, Present and Pursuits. The show opens inside the grand atrium of the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center on Friday, January 6, with a reception from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. that is part of Art Walk.

The Davis Art Center is located at 2301 First Street in downtown Fort Myers. For more information, check back here and follow me on Facebook.

Reflecting back on 'Doors of Opportunity'

One of my earliest Paint Out Loud performances took place in the Fall of 2010 at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center in the downtown Fort Myers River District. Jim Griffith and the Art Center were hosting a show in which artists and school children had rendered paintings on doors they purchased from the Davis Art Center.

The doors, which no longer met Building Code requirements, had been donated to the Art Center and the exhibition was a fundraiser designed to help Jim Griffith and Florida Arts pay for the ongoing restoration of the building. [The building suffered a lot of water damage from leaks in the roof after the courthouse moved to its new location in 1998. Just look at what Jim Griffith found when he finally took over the building.]

Among those taking part in the exhibition were Cesar Aguilera (who won of Best of Show), Pamela Allen, Mark Cranford, Lia Galletti, Andrea Guerrero, Doug McGregor and Jim Crane, Mel Meo, Annette Nelson, Debby Rennirt, Kathy Robinson -Vicki Green and Bonnie Bohn, FGCU students, Fort Myers High School, Canterbury School and the YMCA Kids' Camp.

The plan was for me to paint live during the show’s opening reception. As funds were tight, I purchased a hollow wood door at Home Depot, cut it in half and took the two pieces to the Davis Art Center where, during the reception, I painted The Doors on the doors to the sounds of Light My Fire, People Are Strange, Love Me Two Times and other songs made famous by The Doors while hundreds of people milled through the grand atrium watching me paint and taking in the exhibit. (I’m not really a Jim Morrison (right) or Doors’ fan but, hey, I am a good sport and that was, after all, the theme of the exhibition. I mean, who else could they pick for a Doors of Opportunity exhibition?)

Although he’d been working to restore the old federal courthouse/post office building for quite some time, I had never really crossed paths with Jim Griffith, and he probably thought I was something of a diva when I told him I’d do the event provided they gave me someone to load and unload all my art supplies and be with me during the performance in case I needed something on the spot. (Setting up for a performance and tearing down afterwards takes a huge amount of time and energy, which Jim didn’t realize at the time.) But then one of the two paintings I did that night sold for $3,000, with the proceeds going to the Art Center, and Jim would have happily provided me with an army of helpers had I asked for them. I didn’t, of course, and today Jim and I are really good friends.  

The Doors of Opportunity exhibition closed on November 18, but the show wasn't over. The exhibit traveled across town to the second floor Truck Center Gallery of Fort Myers Toyota (“The Family Store”) on Colonial Boulevard, where the paintings were open to the public starting with the dealership’s 12-Hour Days Sales Event that began on Black Friday (November 26).

A week later, on Sunday, December 5, I did another Paint Out Loud performance during a grand afternoon reception using a door from a Toyota Tacoma supplied by the Fort Myers Certified Collision Center. As I recall, Elijah Green provided the live entertainment.

The show remained up over the holidays, finally closing on January 9, 2011.

Overall, it was a great opportunity to acquaint the public with my performance art and benefit two worthy causes. Each of the artists who sold paintings during the show donated the proceeds of sale to the Homeless Coalition and to the Davis Art Center for restoration of one of Fort Myers most historic and beloved landmarks.

God bless America, land that I love

As the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, I’d like to revisit another “Paint Out Loud” canvas that I rendered in a live performance at the Broadway Palm Dinner Theater. It’s called Remember 9/11 and, like Remember 9/11 Tenth Year, I painted it to honor those who died on that day that changed America forever.

To resurrect the innocence and purity we lost on September 11, I emblazoned the lyrics of God Bless America in the white fields of the fluttering Stars and Stripes. The red stripes, signifying valor and hardiness, are filled with posters extorting Americans to wake up, remember 9/11 and “never forget.” At 10 by 18 feet, the canvas is large, powerful and imposing - like America herself - and represents a clarion call to renewed vigilance, perseverance and justice.

After the ceremony at the Broadway Palm, the Lee County Alliance for the Arts displayed Remember 9/11 at Southwest Florida International Airport (RSW)  as part of the Art in Flight program that it administers for the Lee County Port Authority. From 2009 to 2011, Remember 9/11 was the first artwork domestic visitors, including returning veterans and active duty military service members, when they arrived by air in Concourse D at RSW. It further served as a somber reminder to departing travelers of the reason they are subjected to the time-consuming and nettlesome screenings and enhanced security measures that the Transportation Security Administration has been constrained to impose in a post-9/11 world.

 

Before closing, I'd like to encourage you to take a few moments o remember the brave souls we lost in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. on September 11 and all those who have died or been injured in subsequent terror attacks not only in the United States, but across the globe. Rest assured, living free is the best revenge against those who would have us live in fear.

God Bless America,
Land that I love.
Stand beside her, and guide her
Thru the night with a light from above.
From the mountains, to the prairies,
To the oceans, white with foam
God bless America, My home sweet home.

Painting Out Loud

In my last post, I mentioned “painting out loud.” It’s a term I coined to describe live performances in which I complete a multi-layered large-scale work of art on a museum-quality canvas before a live audience in as little as 15 minutes.

The first such performance I ever did was for a church. I painted a powerful portrait of Jesus for a local congregation while church music played over the loudspeakers for even greater inspiration.

A professional music production, marketing and branding guru by the name of Mark Haffner provided me with some ideas about how to make my performances even more impactful. The result is my present “Painting Out Loud” multi-media show, which features splattered paint, glitter, lights, music and over-the-top special effects.

The Remember 9/11 Tenth Year painting of a soaring American eagle that now hangs in the library at Florida Gulf Coast University was created at just such a “Painting Out Loud” event. I rendered that one before a Standing Room Only crowd at the Broadway Palm Dinner Theater to observe (not celebrate) the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

It was a time to honor heroes, so I pulled out all the stops. I arranged for Fox4 Morning Blend’s Carly Wegner to emcee the event, invited a choir to sing while I painted, and had firefighters and an honor guard on stage as well. It was an emotionally-charged event that neither I nor those who attended it will ever forget.

And that, after all, is the goal of one of my “Painting Out Loud” performances - which is precisely why you should catch one if you ever have the chance.

I typically schedule “Painting Out Loud” performances in connection with fundraisers and other charitable events, conventions and corporate meetings, and have done several for Bealls Department Stores in order to promote my line of casual attire, sportswear, luggage and home goods. Check back here or follow me on Facebook. I’ll post notices of future “Painting Out Loud” performances in both places.