Artist

Leigh Palmer

born Westerly, RI 1943
Born
Westerly, Rhode Island, United States
Active in
  • Duxbury, Massachusetts, United States
Biography

After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied with Richard Merkin, Palmer spent two years in Peru with the Peace Corps. On his return to the United States in 1968, he did graduate work in film studies at Boston University and made educational films for several years before moving to a Pennsylvania farm. He worked as a builder and contractor to support himself until about 1982, and since then has been painting full time. Initially fascinated with the work of Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland, and other members of the Washington Color School, Palmer did hard-edged color field canvases early in his career. Since the early 1980s, however, he has concentrated on still life, setting simple arrangements of fruit and objects into interior spaces and exploring dramatic patterning of light and shadow.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)

Works by this artist (2 items)

Leigh Palmer, Striped Tablecloth with Two Apples, 1983, oil on linen, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1986.6.69
Striped Tablecloth with Two Apples
Date1983
oil on linen
On view
Leigh Palmer, Interior with Three Pears, 1983, oil on linen, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1985.30.56
Interior with Three Pears
Date1983
oil on linen
On view