Leifert: All of my work is by hand, the old fashioned way—no projections or digital and computers. The figures are painted on the canvas. I am a fan of the clean line so I use tape with the larger figures. For the murals, I create my own stencil so I can reuse the images when I’m painting murals. I spent many hours in the Atelier learning life drawing so my figures are proportional. Figures are measured as I learned to do in figure drawing class. I have many models for my paintings. I use professional dancers. The dancers are wearing body-hugging leotards when I draw or photograph them so I can see the line of the body. There is nothing more beautiful than the line of a trained dancer. That is the aesthetic I am interested in.
I paint in acrylic paint because it is easy to manipulate and is nontoxic. First, I lay down colored gesso. Some of that color will eventually peak through in the finished painting. I then organize the composition and decide what I might want the finished result to look like. I will lay down four to five more layers of color—first, warm and then cool until the figures emerge. I decide on a dominant color palette. The painting usually starts out with a plan, but I get a better result when I try not to control the outcome.
I’m in the process of formulating my next series—I’m think of ten panels: groups of people of different nationalities in each panel—doing what their groups do when they gather. I want to make a global statement.
Faktorovich: Do you think the movement to return to painting like a child, as you quote Picasso as leading in your book’s “Introduction,” is connected with the rise of photography and moving images that can achieve exact replication of a scene or a person? Does fine art fill a void that film and photography cannot fill? Can digitally edited artistic photography and film achieve this spiritual high that art has inspired in you and the world? Why or why not?
Leifert: Painting child-like is about being innocent, pure and vulnerable. To have the innocence of a child you must peel away the layers of the onion of your personality that you have built up over the years that protect you from bad things happening. This kind of painting is about feeling. It comes from within—writing, drawing, are as fundamental and primal as dance. I think photography and moving images that can exactly replicate a scene or a person are something else entirely. I also think that painting realism is fantastic—I love those mediums and they are wonderful at reflecting the world around us—even our psychology. I’m interested in something more abstract. I’m not trying to represent something as it is, but to break your perception about it. It’s more fun when there are a few paint strokes and you don’t really know what they are or why they are there. As far as achieving a spiritual high from photography and film—you can achieve a spiritual high from them, of course. It’s just not my path.
Faktorovich: I noticed that many of the movements in your dancer paintings are much more precise and stress the “signature choreographic movements” that you discuss in the “Introduction.” You seem to grab the tensest or dramatic movement in a series rather than just catching dancers in any position that they happen to be in, as Degas typically does with his ballet dancers. How did you choose these positions, and what significance do they have for you, or you hope they would have for your viewers?
“Tumbleweed”
36″x48″
Acrylic and mixed media on canvas
Moving Mediation Series
This painting was inspired by the colors of the California desert.
Leifert: I paint the figure with ENERGY flowing through it!!! I love the climactic moment in a ballet, which is usually the “finale” when the dancers are trying to outdo each other with virtuoso moves across the stage. They demonstrate the peak of being alive. The athleticism and technical ability of dancers today is way ahead of the ballerinas Degas was painting. As technology has advanced so has the evolution of the human body and what it is capable of performing. Athletes keep breaking old records. Dancers are the finest of athletes, that’s why I paint them performing these athletic feats.
Faktorovich: I found an ad for your The Manhattan Dance School Directory book, released by Marcel Dekker Inc. from a January 8, 1979 issue of the New York Magazine on Google Books that explains that it was a collection of the possible dance schools for kids,