The ways creation works

A New York City artist seeks the details of life across the Americas

‘New York, Ecuador, Iowa: Paintings and Drawings’ by Leonard Weisberger

June 3-June 25; opening reception tonight at the Charles City Arts Center, 5-7 p.m.

Free admission, refreshments provided

By Kate Hayden

khayden@charlescitypress.com

Everyone has their own story to share, and some people tell it better than any writer can paraphrase. The following is a conversation with New York City artist Leonard Weisberger, whose collection ‘New York, Ecuador, Iowa: Paintings and Drawings’ opens tonight at the Charles City Arts Center, from 5-7 p.m. The conversation is lightly edited for length and clarity.

“I draw a lot from life because drawing is your way to understand how creation works. When I was a kid, I won some citywide contest for drawing, and then I let it go because you’re a kid (growing up) in the Bronx (New York), you play stickball and things like that.

“I went into the paratroopers when I was 18. I got out of the military, I got back into (drawing), because I had to find a creative outlet after some of the stuff I saw in there. I went back to art when I was 20, and I went to art school. School of Visual Arts, and Lehman College also.

“I met Jane, my wife from Charles City, (in New York). She was a nurse practitioner. I saw her coming down the subway steps and thought she was an angel. We met later in life because I had a marriage and children, and I lived in Ecuador, and I have children who grew up there.

“In Ecuador, the city of Quito is almost ten thousand feet high, so the clouds are floating in the city. The combination of clouds and mountains, it’s like spirit and matter mingled together as one. And that moved me very much, so I spent a lot of time painting that and had shows there. I worked as a cowboy one time, and I would go with my horse to one of these high valleys, put him out to graze and draw, and then come back to paint.

“I went to the cultural house in Quito and they have some Chinese landscape paintings, I started to understand what they were doing. They’re very spiritual. They saw clouds and mountains, spirit and matter together. That moved me to try the same thing.

“You can always get it better. There’s only one creator, I’m just trying to follow them along. Drawing is generally chalk, red chalk, black chalk, sometimes with brush and ink. Painting –– I’ve used oil a great deal and now I’m using acrylic because I can work quickly from nature with it. I worked as a chef most of my life because you can work at night and paint during the day if you don’t mind losing sleep.

“I’ve shown in New York and Ecuador, this is the first time here in Iowa coming up.”

Weisberger’s work subjects are equally split between natural landscapes he has found and the people he’s surrounded by –– many of his New York City pieces take inspiration from people he noticed on the subway.

“In Iowa, there’s a big tree outside the window, you can see the river behind it. So I try to combine it with some of the things I like from Party in the Park –– people, the big tree of life, people under it. I love to work from nature also. I like to do what’s there. The subway was a great place because it’s New York, there’s more than 200 languages and they’re all jammed together in the same car.

“You got to seek out, sometimes, psychological discomfort to wake up, to get things right and not just be comfortable. A lot of artists get too comfortable, you know? A lot of everybody. I always see something more I can do. At this point in life I don’t want to think of art as a product, I want to think of art as me trying to understand creation.

Weisberger and his wife return to stay in Charles City every year from May to late September in his in-laws’ former house.

“I’m happy coming here, this is a very welcoming and nurturing place, Iowa. That 18 feet of blacktop soil has made for some very fine people, including my in-laws who are farmers here. I grew up in New York with people from all over, and where do they come from? They don’t come from big, sleek cities, they come from rural places and then they just start talking a lot faster.

“I’ve sought out adventure, but I don’t have to seek out adventure for thrills anymore. Whatever I seek now is to try to understand myself in relationship to life. Charles City is just one of those places. It’s a good place. People come and you just talk and have conversations. If you listen, you hear stuff that is so incredibly beautiful and so incredibly tragic. You gotta get into it. You can’t deny any of it.”