leonard aitken
Profile
Leonard Aitken has been painting for 30 years. Leonard is prolific, creates art of all types (paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, animations, stories and musical pieces.)
“My botanical paintings are quite intimate. I love insects, the details of leaves, little droplets of water and the peaceful solitude of a small nook in a garden. Light plays an important role in these works. All life comes from light. I especially love backlighting which shows up, the veins in leaves, the shadows of insects and other leaves or flowers showing through the main motif.
“My surrealist works are wild and varied. Many are poetic representations of ideas or feelings which I have imagined or experienced. Others are based on dreams. Still others are purely improvised. These works begin with nothing more than the desire to paint. The paint goes on at random and the image grows and evolves. Often the concepts of these works evolve out of the process of painting. The use of space in my surrealist works is often ambiguous. Forms or areas of paint shimmer, moving backwards and forwards within the implied three dimensional plane of the painted surface. These shifting perspectives are like those moments of transformation within dreams where reality changes to unreality, or where scenes or meanings alter suddenly. The titles of these pieces are usually poetic and invite the viewer to observe the painting from their own perspective.”
