"As a painter, I am instinctively interested in the interaction of light on the environment. It is my intention to express the natural beauty found, at times only for a fleeting moment, in our surroundings. Through my work I hope to capture and convey the sense of enchantment that these moments create."
— Victor Leger
Victor Leger is a keen observer of American landscapes and natural scenery, exalting both through a technique that is marked by its verism and a spectacular use of color. His subjects range from topographical, to geological and botanical, and the beauty of nature is meticulously depicted in all of its wildness, serenity, expansiveness, capriciousness and revelry. Shifting in perspective and vantage point, ranging from birds-eye, to fragmentary depictions of land, sea or sky framed or peppered with vegetation, light and shadow and their respective effects are explored at various temporal and seasonal points. Diverse atmospheric conditions reveal the lived observations of the artist that are the genus of all of Leger’s paintings, and highlight vivid, natural phenomena.
Plein-air painting has always complimented the storied and interminable artistic preoccupation with optics. Each brush stroke created by the artists’ hand is unique and irreproducible, and its delineation of fleeting moments of atmospheric mutability, form a sort of self-referential mutualism. The uniqueness of nature and light, parallel the uniqueness of the act of painting itself. No two clouds are the same, and rivers are always changing; just as a brushstroke can never be exactly replicated – both exist in a realm of simultaneous singularity and eternity. Leger’s work speaks to this, as his paintings are a-historical in their creation en plein-air, and more importantly in their subject matter, as Naturalism, Romanticism and Realism coalesce in each canvas.
Leger’s paintings are of profound importance. They are part of the imperative process of faithfully recording and documenting nature by hand, especially in the context of the pervasiveness in visual cultures of mechanical reproductions. His body of work is a prism of the natural world, reflecting all of its phases and faces. Tides go out, and skies change, and Leger remains, painting through all seasons.
Victor Leger was born in Canada. He studied at the Pratt Institute and completed his BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. He splits his time between Connecticut and Maine, and is an art teacher in Torrington, Connecticut.
