At Home with Leonard Baby

When we enter Leonard Baby’s studio apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it feels like entering one of his paintings. Which is not to say that Leonard often paints from life, or that this specific room features in his work, but a trace of the aura of Leonard’s paintings is here, in the little personal details of a life that bleed in an artist’s work.

Not least the bed, a motif that runs throughout his works. It’s something he paints often, but also somewhere he paints from. It’s easy to read it as a fertile and symbolic space. It’s a place of rest and retreat, sanctuary and intimacy. “The bed is such a central theme of the work,” Leonard says, when asked about its role in the work. “But I'm still trying to figure out what it exactly means, but there’s something just so compelling about the figure in bed.”

He’s spent the summer painting and relaxing, travelling around the east coast, and making work for an upcoming show in Paris in the autumn. Leonard’s career took off when he started posting his paintings on Instagram, Baby being the semi-pseudonymous surname he chose for himself. Until then, he hadn’t really considered that it was possible to make a living as an artist. He grew up in a conservative, religious household, but a neighbour gave him art lessons in her garage, teaching him by copying the masterpieces of the Impressionist age.

“I would make sketches of my favourites little moments from these films I would see at work. It was like they were stuck in my head, and this was the only way I could get them out.”

“So I knew about Van Gogh, and Degas, but being a painter seeing like a historic thing. I didn't know any living painters who made a living that way. I grew up in a small town and all I really knew was that I had to get out, so I moved to New York when I was 17. In New York, I was working random jobs, one of which was at the Metrograph. I was surrounded by cinema all day long, watching films, studying the way directors composed their shots. I would make sketches of my favourites little moments from these films. It was like they were stuck in my head, and this was the only way I could get them out.”

During the pandemic he pushed himself to post the work he was making on Instagram. People started messaging him asking to buy his works. Soon shifts at the Metrograph gave way to a full time career in painting, exhibiting around the world. The film still remained a central organising principle for the work, though. Leonard’s paintings are as cinematic as their original inspiration might make you assume, which draw on everything you might find at a repertory cinema like the Metrograph, from the French New Wave to David Lynch to classic Hollywood. A cinema of subtle gesture, heightened emotion and frozen moments.

It’s not as simple, though, as Leonard simply painting what he sees. He transforms these little fleeting fragments of celluloid into pieces of autobiography, adding and subtracting from the original image until it says something contemporary. If cinema was something for an escape for a younger Leonard, a way to see a world outside a small, conservative town, it remains in the painting as a space of existential possibility and reinvention.

“It's my honesty. That's where I like living. To me, painting is about the individual's truth rather than the broad truth. That's just more interesting to me than capital-F facts.”

Jean Luc Godard famously said that a photograph is truth and cinema is truth 24 times a second. Painting feels like it sits somewhere between those two truths. “My representation of myself through a film still, or a film still on its own, or when I inject a family member into a film still—that might be academically dishonest, but for the message I'm trying to convey, it's emotionally honest. It's my honesty. That's where I like living. To me, painting is about the individual's truth rather than the broad truth. That's just more interesting to me than capital-F facts.”

A lot of discussion about Leonard’s work has focused on his biography—his upbringing in a conservative church, his relationship to his parents, his experiences with conversion therapy, and the way those experiences become part of the work. That is not to reduce the paintings to a single biographical reading, or to treat art as a kind of therapeutic balm. But there is an element of salvation, suffering and loneliness in the work.

He has a Hopper-esque eye for melancholy: the sadness of a bright colour, the loneliness of a room. At the same time, he has an eye for the kind of incidental detail that might have impressed Zurbarán or Holbein: a little tchotchke that reveals something about the personality of the person in the painting, some hint of an otherwise invisible narrative.

He recently painted his first self-portrait, Lucretia, As A Boy, positioning himself in the long lineage of paintings of the martyr, committing suicide after being raped. In Leonard’s rendering of the subject, he’s looking the viewer directly in the eye, a vase of daffodils beside him — which he says used to be used as a poison, as well as being a beautiful flowers. A note, affixed to the wall, reading: “I'm doing what I know is best to do right now.” It’s taken from Virginia Woolf’s suicide note. Leonard refers to it as the most confrontational painting he’s made. “I wanted the painting to land funnier than I think it did, but I think humour and tragedy exist in the exact same place.”

These details were also important in the paintings he made of his sisters for a recent exhibition at Half Gallery in New York, which feature paintings within paintings, Leonard appearing in reflections of mirrors, flowers, beds and other visual clues to their relationships and lives. The effect is not quite the heightened symbolism of Holbein, the skull as memento mori, the fly on the still life, but something closer to a shared contemporary visual language, one that stretches from art history to memes.

“In today’s world, we have endless symbols that we all understand, partly because of meme culture. One example is a painting of my twin sister, with a picture of the Twin Towers beside her. It was an inside joke between us: she’s my twin, and there are the Twin Towers. I found it funny while I was painting it, but the image also carries the weight of 9/11. So humour and tragedy exist in the same place. It’s also a marker of time. For my generation in America, 9/11 was the defining event—it shaped who we became, for better or worse.”

“I think humour and tragedy exist in the exact same place.”

There’s something characteristic in the way Leonard describes the joke: the ability to hold two apparently contradictory feelings in the same image. The joke is corny and the event it invokes is tragic. The daffodils are cheerful and they are also poisonous. A bed is a place of comfort and intimacy and it can also be a place of isolation. His paintings find their energy in that slippage between meanings.

We drift back to talking cinema. I wonder what four films we would most have to watch to really understand Leonard as an artist. “Definitely Fat Girl, by Catherine Breillat, Melancholia by Lars von Trier, and maybe The 400 Blows. And The Princess Diaries,” he says. “It's been kind of shelved in this very specific category of movies for eight-year-old girls, but it's so beautifully shot.”

They are not, on the face of it, films that have much in common. But all four are films in which interior lives become almost unbearably visible. They are films about adolescence, isolation, fantasy and the strange distance between how we experience ourselves and how we are seen by other people. They are also, in very different ways, films that understand the emotional power of an image.