RUINED MILL - AMSTERDAM, NY Painting

Tom Leytham moved to Vermont from NYC in 1973 to open his architectural practice. He became an architect because he loved to draw. Drawing and design have a symbiotic relationship: to draw you have to take something apart and to design you put things together. Describing form and light has been a lifelong artistic passion. He is a self taught draftsman and watercolorist. Shifting to computer drafting was a welcome excuse to return to his love of painting and ending a hiatus from showing of over 30 years. The use of watercolor creates a tactile surface of color and light. The colors mix while wet creating the movement in color and light to mimic the movement of his eye. It is a magical process to watch the image appear out of the paper in sessions typically 12 hours at a time and over 3 or 4 days. The work has evolved in scale from 9x12 to 12x18 to 18x24 TO 22x30 to explore the detail, mass and light on the subject. The result is using color to define the subject and the sparing use of line to define texture rather than mass. There is a mystery about his subjects that invites exploration and imagination. These are places and objects of entropic beauty. Some of them have been restored, some repurposed and some are being consumed by the landscape, but usually these former local landmarks are “hiding in plain sight”. His eye moves around, in and out of the structures. The eye creates the hierarchy of the image to tell the story of what attracts him. His hand follows his eye, repeating the visual journey through the site. The white of the paper becomes a part of the painting emphasizing the point of focus. The use of negative space, the white of the paper put the compositions in motion, many have a pivot point that moves the eye through the subject. Dramatic, low points of view hint at the monumentality of the ruins. They attempt to dynamically balance the compositions. Sibyl Moholy Nagy was his mentor, teacher and a cultural historian [at Pratt Institute]: “Buildings are transmitters of life. They transmit the life of the past into the lives of the future - if they are more than mere shelter and more than borrowed form... But beyond the pedigreed “history in stone” exists an architecture that transmits a different aspect of life. It testifies to the aspirations of the group. Its buildings tell not the official but private history of a culture - the unending struggle for physical and survival of anonymous men.