Leigh Busby’s Cafe Nine Exhibit Shows The Evolution Of An Artist

From now until the end of December, visitors to Cafe Nine will see a change of art on the club’s walls — the photographs and paintings of Leigh Busby, who as a photographer has become one of the most sharp-eyed chroniclers of life in New Haven, particularly during the unrest of 2020, where he was there, camera in hand, to document the outrage and the energy of that summer and show the city to itself.

In combining his photographs and paintings into one show, Busby allows even those familiar with his work a chance to see how he moved from painting to photography, and the lines that carry through all his work.

People now sometimes ​“get real surprised when they hear that” Busby started off as a digital painter rather than a photographer, Busby said, though that was his primary art form for a few years. He first appeared on the New Haven arts scene showing his digital works, created on a tablet and seeing results. In 2013 his work was exhibited at Old Town Hall Museum in Stamford, and the following year, it appeared in an art festival in Seoul, Korea.

Busby began on the two-inch screen of an Android. ​“That’s what I started experimenting on — just exploring,” Busby said. ​“That didn’t work out too well,” he added with a laugh. His progress improved when he got a tablet and learned to use the visual arts app Procreate. He posted his art on social media and began acquiring fans. When his tablet broke, he started a GoFundMe campaign to replace it, and ​“people from all over the world put money together to buy me an iPad.” He continuous appeared among the top 100 iPad artists in the world as determined by the Mobile Digital Art and Creativity Summit.

At the same time, Busby said, ​“people started challenging me on iPad art,” saying that pieces created on an iPad on Procreate were ​“not really art.” Busby vowed to himself to ​“get a canvas and prove them wrong.’” A woman from Ireland who had seen Busby’s art online, and seen the challenges to his credibility, gave him a major push in that direction. She contacted Busby and explained that ​“there’s a gift card waiting for you to help experiment.” Busby recalled. She had purchased him a gift card to buy art supplies at Artist and Craftsman Supply New Haven, on Chapel Street. ​“I want to help you find your path,” Busby recalled her saying. To his shock, ​“when I went to pick up the card it was for $500, and I was able to buy watercolors and pastels, and experiment.” He tried both acrylic and oil paints, too, and ​“it turned out I liked acrylic. I started using that and I stayed with that.”

One of the pieces how hanging on the Cafe Nine wall was created after Busby stayed up all night in his apartment painting it. He went to bed at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning and awoke a couple hours later to a scream from his wife. ​“You painted!” she said.

“I knew I could do it,” Busby said. He had learned from YouTube videos, and from just trying it out himself. He painted from photographs, from memory, from his imagination. ​“I found the way that I learned is visual, not being spoken to,” he said. ​“I’m tactile.” That extended to photography, which he started when ​“I had to learn to take my own reference pictures” for painting, he said.

He found photography classes frustrating; it was better to simply hit the streets and figure it out himself, learning how to get the images he wanted through trial and error. ​“That’s how I shot for so long,” he said. His skills as a photographer steadily improved, but even now, he said, ​“I know what I’m doing, but I don’t know how to explain it. The final result is what’s important.”

“I believe my eyes were trained for photography, and not really for painting,” Busby continued. His artistic experiments with tablets and canvases — ​“all of that led me to being a photographer, to pick up my camera as a weapon of choice,” he said.

Another reason he gravitated toward photography was for the variety it offered. ​“In painting, you have to specialize,” he said. Many painters settle on portraits or landscapes, representational or abstract subjects. Busby didn’t want to do that. ​“I love life,” he said. ​“I love everything that has color, art, movement to it. I love landscapes. I love event photography. I love fashion. I love dance and the emotions at play. And I love sports — I love to capture the emotions more than the action.” Today as a professional photographer he covers everything from sports and fashion shows to concerts. ​“I’m doing everything at a pretty high level. I’m not just going to take one and not do the others,” he said.

But Busby can see the connection between what he does now and the education he got from an art teacher in public school who saw his talent early and believed in him. ​“I think of photography as painting light and dark, the way my teacher trained me,” he said.

He recalled an exercise intended to train the eye to see light and shadow accurately; the teacher’s assignment was to shade a strip of paper, two inches by eight inches, from light to dark, and to make the spectrum in between as even and seamless as possible. Busby excelled at it. ​“She said, ​‘You have the eye that nobody else has. Trust me. You haven’t seen what you’re capable of doing yet. You have a gift in your eyes that you can see the transition.’”

As simple as it sounds, Busby said, it’s the way he approaches his subjects through his camera lens. ​“I see that in all that I photograph now — the darkness and the light. Shadow and light, movement, it’s all the same to me. It doesn’t matter what it is. I would love to shoot an opera, a ballet, a hip hop concert. It’s all light and dark, and shade and color. I don’t even think of the subject. There is no limit — absolutely no limit.”

Leigh Busby’s artwork appears at Cafe Nine, 250 State St., through December.