June Leaf (1929 - 2024) was born in Chicago and knew from a very young age that she wanted to work with her hands, especially inspired by watching her mother sew. She recalled in a 2016 interview with Hyperallergic that she had asked her mother to draw her a high-heeled shoe and proceeded to describe everything that was wrong with it, soon learning that she must take matters into her own hands in order to transcribe the world around her. That lesson expanded during grade school, when she developed an affinity for drawing but found out that the other half of the battle was making others see her work.
"June Leaf uses traditional supports for painting and drawing—canvas and paper—but also more unusual surfaces such as sheets of metal, this being one of her primary sculpting materials. She rarely starts with a pristine surface, because objects often inhabit her space over time and develop a life there before becoming part of her art. Thus Leaf’s methods and studio environment account, in some measure, for the rich and complex textures and the extraordinary interplay between medium and support that is a particularly recognizable quality of her drawings. This is one reason why many of them seem to capture and record a moment seized out of a state of flux. Leaf continuously shifts her studio’s contents, and her images, which resolve themselves from this slow, steady flow of materials, seem as though they might dissolve back into it once again. This is especially apparent when watching her create. Some of her pieces—especially the drawings—have the paradoxical quality of feeling both resolved and unfinished. One feels their churning texture in numerous ways. A sheet will pick up a history before she uses it, collecting marks, stains, bends, folds, and the like. In her studio, the continuity between wall, floor, paper, and canvas is striking. She works her surfaces over and over and over, constantly switching materials, scraping back, washing off, wiping down, and building back up again."
theartofmadeline
titsay
2087
tangentwithtanner
