Oil on canvas
36 x 48 in / 91.44 x 121.92 cm
€3,400
——
Leon Willis
Prince George’s County, Maryland, USA
@_leonwillis
Leon Willis is a tactile painter and artist living in Prince George’s County. Painting almost exclusively with his hands, Willis depicts Black women who draw inspiration from their mothers and grandmothers who continue the legacy of Black beauty practices. With bold, contoured handstrokes, and coils of natural hair, Willis avoids direct depictions of a face instead uses his hands to include fingerprints, and palm marks to suggest movement.
Before turning to canvases, Leon Willis was an editorial makeup artist in New York City, working fashion week and major editorial campaigns in London. Now, Willis uses his makeup skills of brushing and blending to create large scale paintings. But his hands are the main tools. He mixes colors and blends and places palm to canvas, embracing the imperfections a fingerprint would leave, incorporating the scratches with his fingernails.
This method incorporates the skills he learned doing makeup on editorial campaigns, but is the antithesis of the polished, completed looks required to sell clothing and fragrances. Willis takes the technique of photography and makeup artistry, adding the coils of Black hair and fullness of Black lips, covering faces in masks and vibrant makeup, to challenge the industry’s focus on perfection and commerce.
“I wanted to show Black women the way that I saw them. The women I was around that wore makeup always had a story behind it. For example, one of my friends would always wear blue liner. She did it because their grandmother wore blue mascara and they snuck into their grandmother’s room and practiced with it. There was always a story attached to it, a communal practice.” Willis' blue eyeliner can be found in “Evolving Involves Elimination,” a direct reference to this story.
Oil on canvas
36 x 48 in / 91.44 x 121.92 cm
€3,400
——
Leon Willis
Prince George’s County, Maryland, USA
@_leonwillis
Leon Willis is a tactile painter and artist living in Prince George’s County. Painting almost exclusively with his hands, Willis depicts Black women who draw inspiration from their mothers and grandmothers who continue the legacy of Black beauty practices. With bold, contoured handstrokes, and coils of natural hair, Willis avoids direct depictions of a face instead uses his hands to include fingerprints, and palm marks to suggest movement.
Before turning to canvases, Leon Willis was an editorial makeup artist in New York City, working fashion week and major editorial campaigns in London. Now, Willis uses his makeup skills of brushing and blending to create large scale paintings. But his hands are the main tools. He mixes colors and blends and places palm to canvas, embracing the imperfections a fingerprint would leave, incorporating the scratches with his fingernails.
This method incorporates the skills he learned doing makeup on editorial campaigns, but is the antithesis of the polished, completed looks required to sell clothing and fragrances. Willis takes the technique of photography and makeup artistry, adding the coils of Black hair and fullness of Black lips, covering faces in masks and vibrant makeup, to challenge the industry’s focus on perfection and commerce.
“I wanted to show Black women the way that I saw them. The women I was around that wore makeup always had a story behind it. For example, one of my friends would always wear blue liner. She did it because their grandmother wore blue mascara and they snuck into their grandmother’s room and practiced with it. There was always a story attached to it, a communal practice.” Willis' blue eyeliner can be found in “Evolving Involves Elimination,” a direct reference to this story.