050 http://www.AmericanArtCollector.com
W
hen David A. Leffel was
a 19-year-old advertising
student at Parsons School
of Design in New York City,
he took a class trip to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. “At the time, I had no idea
such a thing as a painting even existed.
That was my first trip to a museum,” he
says. “I was so involved with studying
design and layout and illustration, and
I had no idea that contemporary people
were still making paintings. It was
completely outside of my ken.”
Immediately, he was taken by the work
of the Dutch Old Masters—and the paint-
ings of Rembrandt in particular struck a
chord. “I felt the way he used light was
unlike any other painters of that time.
Something about it had an inexorable
quality that really struck me,” says Leffel.
But despite the impression those paint-ings made, it would be a decade before he
started painting seriously himself.
While he was still working in advertising,
Leffel began painting expressionistic works.
“They weren’t quite abstract, but I was
flying by the seat of my pants, so to speak,”
he says. “Then, when I was 29, I decided
I would go to the Art Students League to
learn how to really paint. And that was the
beginning of a change of life for me.”
At the Art Students League of New
York, Leffel still had the same fascination
with light that had ensnared him when
he’d first seen those Rembrandt paint-
ings at the Met. “I wanted to capture that
quality of light, the way the light felt like
it moved throughout the picture plane,”
he says. He studied with painter Frank
Mason while attending the school, and
that fostered an even greater appreciation
for the role of light in oil paintings. Leffeladds, “That was one of the cornerstones of
his teaching: how to capture the feeling of
light on a flat surface.”
Initially, Leffel struggled in his painting
classes, but in Mason’s class, he had
a breakthrough. “I saw light in a very
special way,” he describes. “It was the first
time I had ever seen light as a phenom-
enon. One day in class, I started seeing
light as a moving force, flowing like water
over surfaces.”
Light is still Leffel’s primary focus when
he’s setting up a painting, whether it is a
portrait or a still life. “I’m focusing on
where the light is and what comes out of
the shadows,” he says. “I try to set up the
scene to capture the feeling of movement,
and the thing that is moving is the light.”
While working on his painting Self
Portrait with Vest, Leffel didn’t get caught
up in attempting to create a faithfulMexican Ceramic with Red Lanterns, oil, 17 x 20"