Barbara Leightenheimer with her oil-on-canvas painting, Going my way—March.
LaVerne Kyriss
A teacher by trade and a life-long student, Barbara Leightenheimer served as the SaddleBrooke Fine Arts Guild’s first president. “The guild was already in place when we moved here, but it wasn’t a formal club. I’d joined and the group decided I had the right skills and credentials as both an art educator and a student of Guild classes, so I became the first president. We went to Sun City and borrowed their art group’s bylaws. It was better than starting from scratch,” she remembered.
Leightenheiemer has been interested in art since she was a child. “My father gave me one window in our home that I could decorate. I had letters and pictures. I decorated it for the seasons and holidays.” She entered various art contests as a girl and studied art and math in college with the goal of teaching.
“Whatever art class was offered, I took it—ceramics, pen and ink, enameling, watercolor, batiking, silk-screening. For me, the only criteria were that it be fun,” she said. She also noted that while in graduate school she had the opportunity to judge art shows for other teachers. “That was a lot of fun. You don’t know the students. You just see their work and you can evaluate it without any preconceived notions. It’s much more difficult to judge your own students’ work.”
Leightenheimer also likes big works. “I’ve learned to keep the size of my canvas to about four by five feet. It needs to fit in the car,” she explained. “In college I did a very large portrait and gave it to the subject. I didn’t think about how he was going to get it home,” she laughed. “I figured he could take it off the frame, roll the canvas up, no problem. He ended up building a big crate to carry it.”
Leightenheimer said she particularly enjoys plein air classes. “I enjoy painting outdoors and I especially like having a teacher. Learning is much less painful when I have help and direction. And it’s more fun to have other students around.”
She confesses to never being quite fully satisfied with her work; “There’s almost always something I can do to improve a piece, so I’m never quite done with them.”
“I really like oils but the smell bothers me, so I’m using water clean-up oils,” she explained. “I let a piece hang on the wall for a while and then I go back and rework part of it. I think I’ve done the mountains on that one four times,” she said, referring to the four x five foot desert scene hanging in her SaddleBrooke living room. “I have a horrible time getting the shadows just right. I live with it awhile and then take it down and work on it some more.”
When asked why the piece is not signed, she smiled, “It’s not finished yet.”