LELAND LEICHMAN

est. 1977

I am an American artist living and working in Heidelberg, Germany. I work across figurative drawing and large abstract painting, and have spent my life making art, music, writing, and experimenting with ways of seeing and making. As a musician my first love is contrabass, and that shows up in my visual work as prioritizing line and structure, i.e. melody and rhythm, over color and atmosphere, i.e. harmony, although I absolutely love color and harmony.  

My work orients to simple conditions, like a chess grid,  blind contour drawing, a sequence of movements, a time limit, or another self-imposed rule. The work is an accumulation of movements, sequences, accidents, gestural lines, smudges, drips, erasures, decay and mistakes that takes my impulses somewhere I do not predict. Many paintings contain plain, hand-lettered "how to" titles at the bottom, continuing a long practice of incorporating text into my images to increase tension and conflict. They play on book titles, embrace internet rabbit holes, and incorporate poetry. 

I have been developing a practice over decades that draws on art history, observational drawing, and blind drawing. It refers to and involves: the attributes of the materials I use, gambling, math, poetry, coffee, science, chess, humor, meditation, music, sequencing, writing, walking, decay, repetition, loss, redemption, optimism. I remain interested in what happens when simple, naive notions are given the right frame to blossom into complicated, strange, beautiful life. 
I do portraits every Saturday at my local market (Weststadt HD).

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