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Leon Roulette

Sunlight… deep shadows… a Spanish mission under noonday sun… distant blue sky… terra cotta pots piled with magenta flowers glow red orange… white light floods the square. Dark leaves huddle against a brick column; overhead, arches move massively down a courtyard. These are the aspects of Leon Roulette’s California Mission paintings. Roulette is a romantic painter of places; he searches the world for images of sunlight and color. He, like the venerable California masters Edgar Payne, and William Wendt, is a Plein Air painter. This painting tradition dates back to the French Impressionists Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh. Roulette is a devoted outdoors man and traveler, residing at the foot of the Continental Divide in the Idaho Rockies. He is equally at home in Alaska, Italy, or France… wherever there are picturesque vies and painterly subjects to be found.

Not surprisingly, Roulette’s successes as a painter have grown out of his personal love on natural beauty. As a painter, he values directness and spontaneity. Working with a pallet knife and brush, he approaches the canvas with passion and intensity in an effort to convey his vibrant sense of light. Roulette believes that he is a successful painter when he has “captured the essence of sunlight in my work.” Given that fact, it becomes evident in his examining career that the majority of his works depict a “particular time of day.” It may be dawn, high noon, or dusk… but the sun always makes its presence known. “Without the sun there is no light, no color, no beauty; thus I am drawn to the landscape where beauty is abashedly exudes the fullness of life. My philosophy can be summed up in a word ‘Light.’ A good painting is one that possesses a strong sense of natural lighting. When I capture the essence of sunlight in one of my works, I feel that I am conveying to my audience an actual moment in time.”

In the 17^th century, Dutch painters such as Jan van Goyen, Salomon, and Jacob van Ruysdael achieved remarkable pictorial effects. They would render the sky in shimmering streaks of violet, gray, pink, and blue or convince you that it had just rained and suddenly cleared. The ability to suggest the appearance and energy of nature is no small task, and the best Plein Air painters continue to measure themselves against van Ruysdael and even more so Monet, one of history’s most astute painters of light. He exemplifies a long tradition of remarkable landscape painters: his work is vital, timely, and sustaining. Leon Roulette will establish his place in the history of art.